My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers

AMONG THE

MORRISON, M.D.

and HAROLD GOLDBERG

MY LIFE

AM O N (j THE

SERIAL KILLERS

Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Murderers

HELEN MORRISON, M.D.

and Harold Goldberg

6

p

erfectbound

FOR MY BOYS: Gill, GIV and GED

It is true.The intangibles of your love, caring, laughter, and hugs banish all
the bad and evil that I see and experience in this research. My love to you.

—H.M.

For Mom, and for all those who listen and learn.

—H.G.

Now that I’m about to enter
Unmapped woods
I must shed all excess baggage
and like the backpacker
go light and essential,
leaving behind those luxuries
that have pseudonymed themselves
into necessities.

—JAMES IORIO,
“UNMAPPED WOODS

CONTENTS

Photographic Insert

Author’s Note xi

Introduction 1

ONE

Baby-Faced Richard Macek 7

TWO

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer 17

THREE

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind 31

FOUR

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers 49

FIVE

John Wayne Gacy 67

SIX

The Gacy Interviews 91

SEVEN

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial 101

EIGHT

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams 127

NINE

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams 147

TEN

Serial Killers and Their Families 171

ELEVEN

The Sadism of Robert Berdella 185

TWELVE

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart 201

THIRTEEN

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime 215

FOURTEEN

The International Phenomenon:

Child Killer in Rio 233

FIFTEEN

DNA and the Green River Killer 249

EPILOGUE

Where Do We Go from Here? 263

Acknowledgments 275

About the Authors

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

During the course of my investigations as a forensic psychiatrist, I have
profiled and/or interviewed more than eighty serial killers. When I speak
to them or to members of their families, it is always my policy to have
each of them sign a legal release form that allows me to use what they tell
me for scientific purposes. Some of the letters and interviews from the
people I have profiled appear in this book. They’re presented here not for
the purpose of titillation but to help the reader understand the theories
that I put forth in this book.

INTRODUCTION

T he downtown Chicago summer night was filled with the wind-
spun perfume of nearby roses and freshly mown lawns. My chil¬
dren were in bed, the youngest sleeping soundly with dreams of magic
and Harry Potter, and the oldest sleeping the hard sleep that comes
after playing three periods of ice hockey. Across the street, a young
couple walked hand in hand, and their laughter echoed as they passed
out of view. My neighbors pulled up in their car and I waved to them.
Dressed to the nines, they’d just celebrated their wedding anniversary,
and they waved back as they moved inside their house. As their door
closed and the neighborhood fell completely silent, I began to think
about my own life and the fact that my children and my neighbors
knew only in the most general terms what I do in my professional life.
Our friends recognize that I am a psychiatrist who deals with very dif¬
ficult cases, and perhaps it’s better that they don’t know any more than
that. My two boys don’t know why I sometimes leave for weeks on end,
not yet. What I do is so very far removed from this thriving, affable
neighborhood—the satisfaction we get from planting oak saplings
with the community association, the occasional elegance of charity
galas or the opera—that most everyone would be shocked to hear
about it.

After a few minutes, I went inside our four-story brick house, a
nearly perfect place that was my husband’s grandfather’s home and of¬
fice where he practiced medicine for decades. In the back of the first
floor is a former examination room that now serves as my work space

2 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

when I’m at home. Its walls are coated with tin, still there from years
gone by. It’s the history here, the cheerful medical attention given to
the neighborhood for over eighty years by the good doctors, that in¬
spires me. I pulled from a beige-colored folder some pictures of a child,
a girl not only murdered brutally but also battered nearly beyond
recognition. Sometimes I don’t think I can take the sight of one more
photograph of an innocent whose life has been so senselessly taken.

In preparation for a keynote address to a coroners group, I jotted
down some notes onto a legal pad about the number and location of
each wound on her lifeless body. Nearby were wire mesh baskets, with
reams of other notes, replete with the pictures of other girls and boys,
all murdered. This is not uncommon work for me. It is what I do, and
I believe it is what I was meant to do.

Admittedly, it is not the work that most would choose, but I am
what people now call a profiler, three short syllables that have given my
professional research life a determined focus and purpose. For the past
thirty years, longer than I care to remember, I have been privy to the
most devious inner workings of serial murderers, and I have been com¬
pelled to traverse both the country and the world in a kind of solitary,
endless journey to discover who they are, where they are hiding, and
why they kill. Sometimes I think I know too much about them, cer¬
tainly more than just about anyone in the world. But even as my
knowledge of multiple murderers increases each day, my great fear is
that I will never know enough.

I am not a profiler in the way you’ve seen on television. A few years
ago, Ally Walker starred as the smartly dressed Samantha Waters in the
CBS television series The Profiler. Waters said she worked via “think¬
ing in images,” picturing killers through colorfully edited montages in
her mind in a kind of extrasensory perception that helped her track
down serial murderers. While she could never exactly control her vi¬
sions, they always seemed to arrive at precisely the dramatic moment
that moved the story forward into that most crucial element of prime¬
time television—the commercial. As for me, I am not clairvoyant in
any way. Unlike Sam Waters, I do not see detailed, cinematic flashes of
what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. And al-

Introduction | 3

though some people have called me “The Real-Life Clarice” because of
the books and movies The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, Clarice
Starling and Hannibal Lecter are the stuff of fiction. In Thomas Har¬
ris’s novels, Hannibal develops an emotional bond with Clarice that
belies a twisted, sick love, but love nonetheless. In reality, the caveat in
working with serial killers is that they are completely, utterly inhuman.

As a forensic psychiatrist with a health law degree, my job is
grounded in careful science and in reasoned theory. After speaking at
length to more than eighty of them, I have found that serial murder¬
ers do not relate to others on any level that you would expect one per¬
son to relate to another. They can play roles beautifully, create
complex, earnest, performances to which no Hollywood Oscar winner
could hold a candle. They can mimic anything. They can appear to be
complete and whole human beings, and in some cases are seen to be pil¬
lars of society. But they’re missing a very essential core of human relat¬
edness. For them, killing is nothing, nothing at all. Serial murderers
have no emotional connection to their victims. That’s probably the
most chilling part of it. Not only do they not care, but they also have
no ability to care.

With serial killers, I never quite know whom I’m dealing with.
They are so friendly and so kind and very solicitous at the beginning
of our work together. I’ve been swept up into their world, and that
world, however briefly, can feel right. I’ve often thought, Is this person
the right person? Is all the work I’ve done—painstaking research, sci¬
entific collection of data, complex theorizing—simply wrong? Maybe
I missed something. They’re charming, almost unbelievably so, charis¬
matic like a Cary Grant or a George Clooney (although they rarely are
as handsome). They treat me as if I am their kindred spirit.

However, when I sit with them for four to six hours at a time, solid,
without interruption, everything changes. My interviews are crafted to
seem like talks, easy conversations. I’ve learned that a serial murderer
can’t maintain his solicitous role for any period of time past two to
three hours. At this point I can begin to strip away the superficial layer
of affability to reveal a dark, barren core.

He begins to fidget, sigh, tsk, clear his throat, roll his eyes, look

4 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

around. Small beads of sweat form on his forehead. Finally, he begins
to become annoyed, begins to break down. What he’d rather I do is sit
there patiently and become a repository for his endless thoughts and
ramblings. Yet through a combination of indulgence, tolerance, listen¬
ing, and constant indirect questioning, I will always get him to say
more than he wants to say. It can take months for a breakthrough, and
when it comes, there’s nothing more electrifying, nothing more satis¬
fying.

A good portion of the satisfaction I get comes from piecing to¬
gether the facts that help me understand a case and then make it more
cohesive. Each fact or datum becomes a part of a monumental puzzle,
and I try to connect the information to other crimes that have been
done. Along the way, I learn more and more about the serial killer—
life story, personality, the attitude he has toward his victims—bit by
bit. It is painstaking and difficult, particularly because it involves pre¬
cious, innocent human life that has been snuffed out senselessly and
horrifically.

From the more than a hundred files I sifted through in preparation for
my speech, I could see the victims’ struggle and pain in the photo¬
graphs. The signatures of serial murderers emerged on the bodies of
their poor victims—bites, cuttings, or knots they used to make their
marks, as though they were marking their handiwork with some kind
of misplaced pride.

Later today, I will drive down to Merillville, Indiana, a sleepy town
of about 27,000 people. It’s the very picture of American suburbia with
its IFdOP, Lowe’s, and Costco. Inside the Radisson Fdotel I will give the
keynote speech to the annual meeting of the Indiana Coroners Associ¬
ation. As the coroners sip coffee and eat morning Danishes, I’ll deliver
my address, explaining my theories about why serial killers are com¬
pelled to kill. What signs of a serial killer should coroners hunt for at
a crime scene? What triggers their actions? What makes them tick?
Why do they continually hunger for murder? The popular perception
is that they have been physically and/or sexually abused by their par¬
ents when they were innocent children. That is the stuff of fiction—a

Introduction | 5

complete misconception. In the pages that follow, I’ll explain my the¬
ories, some of which are controversial. But they are grounded in
decades of research and science. In addition to my own ideas, I’ll take
the reader on a journey though these killers’ brains, with transcripts
from our psychiatric sessions and in their own words from their own
letters.

Into my briefcase’s front pocket, I placed a particular file, one bear¬
ing three names that may be familiar to you, John Wayne Gacy. Gacy,
a paunchy fellow who often dressed as a clown with a huge, red-
painted mouth when he entertained the sick and infirm at local
Chicago hospitals, raped, tortured, and then buried many of his vic¬
tims under the floorboards in his house. The case would soon become
a staple of the press, which depicted Gacy as the very incarnation of
evil, the devil himself. It was 1980 when I first encountered this mur¬
derer of thirty-three young males.

It was close to Christmas when my husband and I returned to
Chicago from our honeymoon, and we were excited about settling into
our new apartment. Ours wasn’t the most luxurious apartment in the
world, but at the time it seemed the perfect nest for two doctors deeply
in love. I had picked up the mail and sat down at the kitchen table to
go through the bills, magazines, and Christmas cards that had accu¬
mulated. There were small packages, medical journals, and too much
junk mail. But one envelope bore unfamiliar handwriting. Inside was
a card with primitive handmade art, drawn with a pen and colored in
with crayon, of Christmas trees and a snowman. Inside the card, the
inscription read, “Peace on earth. Good will to men . . . and boys—
John Wayne Gacy.” It was obscene, bold, as though Gacy were cele¬
brating his brutal murders of so many young men. There was no way
that Gacy, who I was to interview shortly, should have had access to
our unlisted address. But he had found it and sent the card directly
from jail. Gacy’s “greeting” made me realize once again the danger in¬
herent in my work, not only to me but also potentially to my family. I
had been threatened and taunted before, so I tried to put Gacy and his
murders aside, but my husband took the incident hard. For some time,
he couldn’t stop worrying about it . . . and me.

6 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

I finished crafting my lecture for the coroners and put the speech,
photos, and notes into the worn leather briefcase. I turned briefly to
pat my green jade turtle for good luck, switched off the light, and qui¬
etly closed the door. As I walked upstairs to bed in the semidarkness,
there were some things I felt I knew for certain. Serial killing can be
explained and understood. There are intricate but knowable patterns
that every serial killer maintains. And because of what we’re learning
regarding the patterns of DNA and genetics, the very phenomenon of
serial killing may be preventable in the future. In this book, which is
the story of a good portion of my career, I hope to begin to explain
how.

ONE

BABY-fACED
RICHARD MACEK

I n March of 1977, the old road to Waupun, Wisconsin, was some¬
how eerie and foreboding, not simply rural but isolated in the
kind of way that makes you watch your back. About twenty minutes
outside of Madison, the colorful, welcoming signs for homey diners
and Wisconsin cheddar cheese vanished, and the whole world seemed
devoid of life. The sleepy fields along the way were still brown, not yet
tinged with green, and there was an uncanny quiet, made heavier by
the gray, chilly day. To be quite honest, I was nervous. I was a young
doctor about to step into a world brimming with horrible crime and
serial murder. It was a world full of macho, hard-drinking law en¬
forcement officials who’d seen too much, and I wondered if I would be
accepted or even tolerated not only as a professional, but also because
I was a woman. Occasionally, I gripped the steering wheel too hard, as
if driving straight and steady on the highway would steady my
thoughts. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror, to make sure the
anxiety didn’t show. It was important that I appear calm and com¬
posed.

I was no stranger to challenges, to tough times. As a child living in
a small town near Pittsburgh, I never knew my real parents. It’s not

8 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

that I didn’t yearn to find out. It just wasn’t part of the deal. My parents
weren’t that kind. Sure, six other children and I had a roof over our
heads, and food, but when it came to the real security that love can
provide, well, it simply wasn’t present. It sometimes seemed that the
reason six others and I were children to these people was due to factors
not understood, even now. Our lives as children were often unremit¬
tingly dark, and we were very alone in the world the parents defined.

But in one way I was ahead of the game. I discovered an early pas¬
sion for what I wanted to do. At the age of eleven, I watched as eight-
year-old Beth, one of my favorite siblings, came down with scarlet
fever. The rash of scarlet fever usually looks like a bad sunburn with
unsightly but tiny bumps. I often felt like a mother to the rest of my
siblings, so as her condition worsened, her chills and shakes, high fever,
and vomiting had me worried. As she hallucinated, I was sure she was
near death. I became frightened, full of the kind of all-encompassing
terror that only children can feel. But when a doctor came to the house
to treat her, she soon began to recover. In my young mind, I thought
the doctor was a miracle worker. Amazed, I vowed right then to be¬
come a doctor. I was working by age twelve to bring in money, and I
believed that if I worked harder and longer than anyone else, I could
accomplish anything to which I set my mind—including becoming a
doctor. It didn’t matter if I had to deliver newspapers or if I worked as
a waitress or a clerk in a grocery store to do it. Sometimes, I stood rest¬
less at the outskirts of our small town. And I imagined myself some¬
where else, traveling to the more exotic places I saw in magazines or
heard about on the radio. I could get out. I would get out. I had to.

As I drove, I kept thinking about what the FBI agent had asked me.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Special Agent Louis
Tomaselli obviously had seen a lot in the course of his job, but the
gruesome nature of the eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs he
showed me had him mystified and concerned. Tomaselli was smooth
talking, dark haired, and wiry. He had this way of talking with his
hands. Careful but darkly animated, his hands moved not simply to
express what he said but also gestured, twisted, and grabbed the air to

Baby-Faced Richard Macek | 9

help me picture the words. Early in our conversation, he said, “There’s
not much difference between me and the bad guys—except the FBI
got to me first.” The off-the-cuff comment startled me, but it made
sense. If you’re straight and narrow and you’re going in undercover, you
may be too conspicuous and your cover will be blown. Like a
chameleon, you have to blend into the environment in which you’re
working. It never crossed my mind that people could go either way. I
was young, from a town so small you might think it was just a bunch
of nondescript wood frame houses at a dusty intersection. My sense
had been that you were either right or wrong, that the rules in life were
very black and white. This was just one of the myriad of core beliefs
that would change radically for me in the months ahead.

Tomaselli approached me moments after a seminar I cotaught in
1977 called “The Use of Hypnosis in Criminal Investigations.” At that
time, law enforcement was intrigued with the possibilities of using
memory-enhancing techniques like hypnosis, so the seminar was well
attended. I told them that hypnosis is simply a state of deep, intense
focus and has nothing to do with magician’s wands. I myself was the
subject, but it wasn’t at all about strutting around onstage like a
chicken. I was shown a photograph of a crime on a subway before and
after I was hypnotized. The officials in the room were impressed that I
was able to recall many more of the details within the picture when I
was hypnotized. Everyone in attendance learned that memory could be
improved but not manufactured through hypnosis.

Hundreds of investigators like Tomaselli had gathered just outside
of Madison, Wisconsin, from around the state for a two-day confer¬
ence about investigating and solving homicides more effectively. Many
of the seminars dealt with hard-to-crack cases. Crime scenes would be
set up and the law enforcement professionals in the audience would try
to piece together what had happened. In my short career as a resident
specializing in child and adult psychiatry and neurology, the cases I’d
dealt with were routine, and I knew I wanted a deeper level of in¬
volvement and understanding. As a doctor, but more as a human
being, I was hungry for knowledge.

Tomaselli had come up against a seemingly insurmountable brick

10 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

wall. He and the FBI could not find the perpetrator of the vile crime
captured in the photo. Yet he was not about to quit, even though he
had tinkered with just about every possibility he could conjure up. As
Tomaselli spoke, I found myself captivated by all of it, the idea of an
unsolved mystery, the idea that, in the world of crime and crime solv¬
ing, there was, in addition to life-and-death drama, room for good, ob¬
jective science. And perhaps room for me as well.

Tomaselli removed more photos from a manila envelope. The im¬
ages were of a woman, brutally stabbed several times. She was left on
her back in room 18B at the upscale Abbey resort hotel on the shores
of Lake Geneva, about fifty miles southeast of Madison, Wisconsin.
Violence was unheard of at the Abbey, and the crime shocked every¬
one within a hundred miles. At least for the moment, the lakeside re¬
sort could no longer be considered the “Newport of the West.”

The photos didn’t shock me—it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen blood or
violence before. After finishing undergraduate work at Temple Univer¬
sity, I was a medical student in Philadelphia at the height of the riots
in the late 1960s. Blood filled the hospital at the Medical College of
Pennsylvania, and our ER looked more like a M*A*S*H unit, as
though war had broken out in the streets. Those days will forever stay
with me.

Tomaselli was still holding the photo, and he was focused on some¬
thing the killer did to the woman’s face. He had taken a penknife and
made slits in her eyelids.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Tomaselli repeated. I
looked closely again, especially at the slits. It almost looked like the
kind of primitive, ritual cutting common to ancient cultures. If you
look back in history, runic symbols were sometimes cut into the palms
of Germanic women during labor and childbirth as early as the third
century B.C. But it was clear this modern-day act had nothing to do
with long-lost magical symbols expected to promote health, freedom,
or valor. This wasn’t about pagans and enchantment; this was bar¬
barism. Here, as the woman lay lifeless on her back, it was clear there
were also visible signs of strangulation. But Tomaselli said that accord¬
ing to the coroner and others involved in the criminal investigation,

Baby-Faced RichardMacek

11

the murderer continued brutalizing her after she was dead. He stabbed
her repeatedly. And then he slit her eyelids.

I said no, I hadn’t ever seen anything like it. No longer darkly exu¬
berant, Tomaselli stopped talking and stood there, waiting for me to
say more. I looked him straight in the eye. “But if you ever catch him,
I’d like to talk to him.”

It was exactly what he wanted to hear. He said he’d be in touch.

I didn’t obsess about those photos, but I thought it was somehow
compelling to see that kind of violence and brutality. It’s not just about
the horrible idea of someone getting stabbed. It’s the whole, unnatural
disarray, the chaotic scene of someone’s life cut short, and the intense
awareness that someone, someone vicious, is still on the loose. What
was he doing? Was he scheming, planning his next attack? Was he
stalking someone in broad daylight even as I thought about him?

Instead of fear, I felt curiosity. What kind of person would be able to
commit that sort of crime and then disappear? What drove him? What
went on in his mind? Such foul crimes are most often committed by
members of a victim’s family, and most people who commit such a crime
are caught very quickly. But these crimes were of a different sort,
strangers. Here, law enforcement was trying to connect the wretched
crimes of one geographical area to those in another area entirely. And it
had become clear this killer was a complete stranger to his victims.

He was, as it turned out, Richard Otto Macek, a man alleged to have
killed at least five women. As I drove northeast from Madison in my
eight-year-old Datsun station wagon, I had no specific idea of what to
expect. I only had Macek’s name, his date of birth, and a general sense
of the crimes for which he was suspected. Of course, I remembered the
photographs of the brutalized maid, black-and-white photos that now
had all the depth and brilliance ofTechnicolor as I thought about them.
In my mind, I envisioned various fuzzy images of people who are vio¬
lent and could cause destruction. I imagined that Macek would be dark,
hulking, disheveled, and wild-eyed, intimidating in every way.

When I passed through the placid streets of Waupun, I noticed sculp¬
tures of pioneer women on the streets and in front of City Hall, the

12 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

eyes of which looked up to the skies in a kind of hope. They had names
like Dawn of Day and Morning of Life, a kind of expectant optimism
that did little for the depressing place. I supposed Waupun needed
anything that would cheer its citizens, since the town of ten thousand
housed not one but three prisons, including Central State Hospital.
I’m not sure why there were three jails; I only know they kept a lot of
people employed.

While he awaited trial for the Abbey murder, they kept Richard
Macek in a highly secure and heavily guarded room at Central State
Hospital in Waupun, a place where the criminally insane received the
help they needed. The authorities suspected Macek of five murders—
including that of the maid and one in Illinois—but Macek claimed he
couldn’t remember the crimes. Both police and doctors were highly
suspicious of his story, but at Central State, the best psychiatrists
couldn’t get much out of Macek.

The hospital was housed in an old stone building, ugly and stand¬
ing low amid desolate, barren fields. The gulag-like place was sur¬
rounded by a barbed-wire high fence. After double-checking that my
bag held a cassette tape recorder, extra batteries, some pens, and a
notepad, I made my way to security, which was much tighter than I ex¬
pected. The guards were off-putting and rude, like high school bullies.
After the requisite metal detector, I was told I couldn’t bring in my tape
recorder. The thing that got me was that use of the device had been
prearranged. The guards themselves were condescending and kept re¬
peating, “You can’t carry this tape recorder in. You don’t have permis¬
sion from the warden.” And I said, “I do.” And so it went around in
circles. Sometimes I think the guards in these institutions are worse
than the prisoners. These particular guards proved the cliche that
power corrupts. This was their turf and it was their rules, petty as they
were. And it would be their rules without exception.

They held me up for forty-five minutes before Agent Tomaselli ar¬
rived to whisk me through. I forced the confrontation with the guards
from my mind as we walked quickly through a maze of halls. Tomaselli
explained that police caught Richard Macek after a woman he attacked
in a Laundromat fled. She freed herself from his grip and jumped from

Baby-Faced RichardMacek

13

his car at a stoplight. When questioned, she explained to police that his
car had a broken red taillight. Before I could hear more, a squeaky door
with a wire-reinforced window opened into a small, airless meeting
room with green walls. Inside sat the warden, an investigator from Illi¬
nois, and one from Wisconsin. As I looked around, I felt like I was in¬
truding on a private old boys’ club.

The warden, seemingly bored, sat in a Hawthorne chair, his bulk
bulging through the oak slats. Staring past me, the warden blandly
asked, “How can you help us?”

I said that through hypnosis, I might be able to bring out what
Richard Macek had forgotten, especially the specific details of the mur¬
ders he may have committed.

“Hmmm,” said the warden as though he didn’t believe me.
“Hmmm,” as if my response didn’t merit even a word. Their noncha¬
lance bewildered me. Did they want to get to the bottom of the mur¬
ders for which he was suspected or not?

Throughout the meeting, they didn’t look me directly in the eye, and
they often spoke as if I weren’t present in the room. It was quite clear that
the law enforcement people had an agenda much different from mine.
They wanted to use me as their agent to coax Macek into confessing to a
crime in Illinois—to the murder of a teenager named Sally Kandel. On
January 25, 1973, warehouse worker Richard Milone was jailed and later
convicted of the murder, but Milone protested that he was innocent, and
a group of people, including Tomaselli, believed Milone. A small but grow¬
ing amount of public pressure made the supposedly closed case fester like
an open wound. The murder of young Sally Kandel was particularly ap¬
palling because the killer had bitten her severely. It most likely was Macek,
but he had pulled out all of his teeth before forensic odontologists got to
her case. Since he now was without his real teeth (he now wore dentures),
it would be far more burdensome to link Macek to the bite marks.

But I had my own agenda; I wanted to begin a scientific study, one
that looked into what made a serial murderer take innocent lives re¬
peatedly. I kept thinking this was a necessary and interesting research
project. If things worked well, it might really reveal something impor¬
tant about the many unknown aspects of a serial murderer, from his

14 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

childhood to plotting the act of killing. It might even be beneficial to
other crime investigations in the future. But they kept thinking that
hypnosis was an unusual way to get him to confess.

The investigator from Illinois, a skinny man with a snipe-like nose
that was too long and ears that were too large, blanched at the prospect
of a scientific study.

He cleared his throat. “Scientific study,” he mumbled, tapping his
pen on the table as though he were aggravated. I began to wonder why
Tomaselli had invited me at all.

I felt an unspoken condescension in the room, one that asked,
What is an attractive, probably not competent, woman like you doing
here? I tried my best to alleviate the situation; to put them at ease and
make myself less threatening, I smiled at them even though they didn’t
smile at me. Without Tomaselli’s urging, I didn’t think I’d be there. But
one thing became clear as I listened to them talk—they felt that Macek
had committed many more killings than the brutal stabbing of the
maid. And that’s why I was here. They were so baffled they might even
let a young doctor still in residence into their cloistered world of crim¬
inology—if it helped to unravel the case. I would have to prove myself
in these few minutes we had before Macek came into the room.

Bear in mind that it wasn’t yet a great time for women in the work¬
place. These still were the early days of the feminist movement, and
women generally were not treated like equals. The National Organiza¬
tion for Women was not yet a decade old, the first battered women’s
shelter had just opened, and Ms. magazine was considered to be radi¬
cal, bordering on Communist. As recently as 1972, the Equal Rights
Amendment had passed the Senate, but only twenty-two of the thirty-
eight required states ratified it. Women then held slightly more than a
dozen seats in Congress. It was thought to be a revolutionary time, but
a difficult time as well. Women had to act either aggressively to change
their circumstances or had to focus clearly to keep plodding away in
the trenches. I was certainly not a burn-your-bra kind of feminist. I
didn’t attend protests or marches or meetings. Yet I was of a single
mind—to be the best doctor I could be, and no one was going to stop

me.

Baby-Faced RichardMacek

15

Therefore, I was determined not to become annoyed by the officials
in the room, no matter how I was treated. My approach was assertive
and workmanlike. I thought, I’ll let the insulting behavior wash away
like water off a duck, but let’s get done what needs to be done.

When two guards brought Richard Otto Macek into the meeting
room, I couldn’t believe what I saw. He was nothing like what I had
anticipated. He was a short man in his thirties with whitish hair that
bore remnants of blond and an unmemorable, babyish face. He was
dressed in a drab brown shirt and pants issued by the prison hospital.
Macek himself was physically odd. He was powerfully built, short and
stocky, and he struck me as having brawny arms and a massive torso,
reflecting enormous strength. Paradoxically, he struck me as pudgy
with a peculiar combination of male and female characteristics, in¬
cluding a roundish body and soft, almost delicate, features.

Although he had shackles on his feet, he was not at all the odious
murderer I expected. He looked right at me, smiled brightly, and
shook my hand with a manly grip. It was as though this were a social
event and he was trying to play the part of attentive host. He smiled
again, this time showing his somewhat ill-fitting dentures.

“How’s the weather? How was the drive?” he asked. He put his
hands on his hips. “Are you comfortable in that chair? If not, we could
get another chair.”

When he spoke, his manner was exceedingly friendly. In a way, it
was almost like role-playing—as though someone had given him a
script and said this is how you’re supposed to behave. He minded his
manners. He joked, laughed, and generally kept the conversation light
and breezy. He seemed pleasant, someone you could talk with easily. It
was absolutely puzzling—how could a cold-blooded murderer act so
convincingly polite?

The law enforcement people left after Macek signed a release stat¬
ing that any and all of his words to me could be used in any way, even
for Illinois or Wisconsin to convict him. As we sat in the room alone,
I continued to be struck by the overall impression that he appeared to
be a nice man, that perhaps they had jailed the wrong guy. In the com-

16 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

ing twelve months, however, I would speak to Richard Macek for over
four hundred hours. I would get to know him better than most of his
family ever did. It wouldn’t take a full year to really get to know
Richard Macek, however. Within weeks, what I found out about him
would have stunned his closest relatives.

TWO

DANGEROUS TERRAIN:
HYPNOTIZING A
SERIAL KILLER

O n March 8, 1977, the day we met, Richard Macek had written
a letter to me about that meeting. The paper bore a coat of
arms in the lower right corner, featuring two armed lions facing each
other with their tongues sticking out. Under the lions’ paws stood the
motto In hoc signo vinces. It is a Latin phrase meaning “In this sign
thou shah conquer” and was adopted by Constantine after he had a vi¬
sion of a cross in the heavens, a waking dream that occurred just prior
to his victorious battle against Maxentius in A.D. 312. A popular and
adaptable battle cry, In hoc signo vinces has been employed by everyone
from the Catholic Church to neo-Nazi hate groups to advance their
various causes. It was interesting that Macek used the coat of arms,
since Macek was a man who had nothing and now had less. Whenever
I spoke with him, it was clear Macek wanted to be more than he was.
To pretend he had an important history full of adventure and blue-
blood relations, he took to adding this coat of arms to his letters.

All prisoners write letters: it passes the time, and they have too
much of that. The notes are always self-involved; they write about their

18 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

days and nights—even when nothing much happens. Macek’s two-
page handwritten letter included the announcement that he was “a lit¬
tle insecure and scared around women.” What a lie this was for a man
who murdered women exclusively. What concerned me was not his
revelation about being “scared around women.” That was a ruse. How
would I get to him? How would I break through and coax him into
lowering his guard? In my heart, I knew I was in for a royal struggle to
find out if this man, who often bit and chewed on his victims with
feral intensity, fit any kind of diagnostic category of psychiatric disor¬
der, any classification of murderer known to us throughout history.
The rest of Macek’s letter was uneventful and devoted to sucking up,
as if he hoped that speaking to me would help his case. Yet I was glad
he wrote, and hoped he would write more. The more I knew about
him the better.

Because I tend to compartmentalize and focus acutely on the task
at hand, I hadn’t given the Richard Macek case all that much thought
in the two weeks that had slipped by since our first meeting. When I
was a third-year resident at the University of Wisconsin Medical Cen¬
ter, my life was a constant whirl of seminars, patients, teaching med¬
ical students, and generally working through the sometimes hellish
duty of being on call.

To a young transplant, the expansive Midwest was full of a culture
about which I knew very little. Though I could have chosen a resi¬
dency on the more familiar East Coast, recruiters convinced me that
the program was eclectic and well-rounded and that they really wanted
women at Wisconsin. There had been on-campus protests by the stu¬
dents demanding that women become an integral part of the medical
school and residency programs.

By the 1970s Madison was a progressive-minded city of 150,000
considered to be the Haight-Ashbury of the Midwest. Not only was it
still full of the introspective culture and the patchouli-laced lifestyle of
hippiedom, but it also brimmed with anti-Vietnam War rhetoric and
wild experimentation with drugs . . . and violence. While a resident at
the University Hospital, I lived in the shadow of the 1970 bombing of
the physics building. Sterling Hall was attacked by four anti-Vietnam

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer

19

War protesters who dragged six barrels of ammonium nitrate and fuel
oil into a van, only to explode the vehicle and its dangerous contents,
damaging twenty-six buildings. The explosion was earth-rattling
enough to be heard twenty miles away.

Years later, the event still loomed large, and it seemed that a form
of anarchy still reigned on campus and in town. Students who were de¬
pressed or who lost control after a night of drug-filled partying would
walk off dormitory roofs. In the student union, I would often en¬
counter one of my schizophrenic patients. If I made the mistake of ig¬
noring him or not acknowledging his presence, his paranoia could lead
to a confrontational scene that could grow inflamed and end in fury.

I sometimes escaped by going off and riding a light blue Schwinn
ten-speed bicycle. North of Madison on a railroad bed long abandoned
by any train was the thirty-two-mile Elroy-Sparta trail, which wound
through rock tunnels and among pine trees and sugar maples, wood vi¬
olets and speckled red granite. But when I returned, I often had to deal
with hospital politics.

As one of four women granted residency that year, I was tolerated
(though certainly not embraced) by the departmental and hospital ad¬
ministration that so actively had recruited me. After serving on various
committees and working very diligently, I was elected president of the
280-person house medical staff. The hospital administration even sent
a dozen long-stemmed roses in a pretty box to my office, which I cut
and arranged in a vase. As I placed the flowers on my bookshelf, the
first thing that crossed my mind was that they wouldn’t have sent roses
to a male doctor, and I wondered if they had an inkling of what was
going on with the embattled and disgruntled medical staff.

On the next day, I began with my executive staff a process whose
ultimate goal was to unionize the residents, primarily because one of
the brightest young doctors was fired without due process. We were
working a hundred hours each week—which we accepted wholeheart¬
edly. But we wanted training, security, and various quality-of-life issues
to be adequately addressed as well. Since our move for organization
was chronicled in the local papers, administration officials must have
rued the day they called the florist. Finally, after a fair amount of news

20 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

coverage, the administration backed down and agreed to due process.
We felt we had achieved our goals, and we dropped the idea of form¬
ing a union.

Despite working as a resident with not a lot of money to spare, I
had moved into a charming apartment. I felt a rush of independence,
as though I’d moved up in the world. Meanwhile, I was wrestling with
the challenge of the child-faced Richard Macek, and how precisely to
strip away those layers of congeniality. It was my job to reach an un¬
protected inner core that would lead me to learn much more about the
murders he may have committed.

I’d already had Dr. Brooks Brennin, a psychologist specializing in
aggression, interview Macek. After poring over the results of a
Rorschach inkblot test (which was very much in vogue at the time), it
became obvious to Dr. Brennin and me that Macek responded on an
exceedingly basic oral level, seeing monstrous teeth with jagged edges
in one of the black forms. The oral stage is a phrase coined by Sigmund
Freud, who believed a baby’s mouth is the center of his primary plea¬
sure during his first few hundred days of living. Macek’s interpretation
of the images conveyed resentful and aggressive attitudes, possibly be¬
cause he felt he didn’t get what he needed as a child from those around
him, especially his mother and father. It also indicated Macek’s possi¬
ble antipathy toward his parents (perhaps over feeling unloved) and
toward children who seemed to have what he felt he could not. It was
very likely that Macek was overwhelmed by the developmental de¬
mands of babyhood and had severe conflict in the oral period. For ex¬
ample, infancy is a time when the child has no physical power to use
weapons, other than the act of biting, to be destructive.

Richard explained he was never the center of attention, and he re¬
ported that he felt inadequate and inferior. His decreased tolerance for
frustration and rejection could have played a major role in the acts of
voyeurism for which he was arrested when he was a younger man. In
addition, his Rorschach test responses indicated a fear of his masculine
identity, and the denial of the need for his mother and father. But
Rorschach tests are just one indication for a psychiatrist. For instance,
if you go to a family doctor and get a blood test, and that test reveals

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer | 21

an elevated white blood cell count, that’s not the end of the story. More
tests need to be done. So it was for Macek, except my tests would take
much more time to complete than any kind of test a family doctor
might perform.

I picked up the phone and arranged for Dr. Roger McKinley, a rep¬
utable hypnotherapist, to put Macek into a trance. McKinley would
help Macek remember events that he was unable to recall. At least
Macek would perceive some of his memories more vividly through con¬
centration and relaxation. Since it appeared that all of the murderer’s
crimes were against women, I didn’t want to attempt the procedure my¬
self and risk being perceived as a potential victim as we probed Macek’s
mind. After all, there was the chance that, in a trance, Macek would see
me as someone he wanted to kill when he began to relive a killing.
McKinley had an impressive depth of knowledge and was the same ex¬
pert with whom I conducted the seminar where I met FBI Agent
Tomaselli. We didn’t socialize as friends, but we worked very well to¬
gether. Because of all this careful planning, I was sure the procedure
would go well.

The next few days passed quickly, and there I was, driving up to Cen¬
tral State in Waupun once again. As I turned into the parking lot of
the depressing old prison hospital, I was eager to discover what grim
memories lay buried inside Macek’s brain and what thought processes
were embedded in his mind. Most people think that when a subject is
hypnotized, the doctor probes the unconscious mind, which Freud
thought was the mind’s repository of the weird and frightening mem¬
ories with which a person just cannot deal. But you can never get into
the unconscious; you can get to what’s called the preconscious, where
bits of information that border the unconscious can be found. But pa¬
tients do need to be prodded for recollection to make it out of the pre¬
conscious.

McKinley had hauled from the trunk of his Mercedes a heavy reel-
to-reel tape recorder along with a case full of other equipment, includ¬
ing cords, a microphone stand, and a microphone—all to be
painstakingly inspected by the always suspicious guards.

22 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

McKinley and I set up the machinery in the same dreary, cramped
interview room in which I first met Macek. The prisoner was led in,
still affable, still exchanging pleasantries. There is no real preparation
for hypnosis, no drugs, no pep talk, no blood tests. Macek knew he
was going to be hypnotized, and he appeared ready. The baby-faced
killer had agreed in writing to be hypnotized, but when we started he
was somewhat anxious, worrying that people were stopping to peer
into the cramped room at him through a small window. Macek didn’t
want to be stared at, and he didn’t want to be the subject of hospital
gossip, which was percolating due to a growing media frenzy that sen¬
sationalized Macek and his crimes. In addition, the low voices of
those outside the door, including one of the guards, got under his
skin. We pressed on, though. As the hypnosis began, McKinley sug¬
gested that Macek imagine himself in a field of fragrant clover, where
the annoying voices he heard became the meaningless noises of a
pleasant world that bathed and engulfed him. But an aggravated
Macek said that he wished to be in the field by himself, alone and
away from any human sounds whatsoever. Though his body relaxed
and his breathing slowed, his mind was somehow still tense. Finally
he closed his eyes and went into what seemed to be an absorbing hyp¬
notic state.

The first words he uttered were simple but forceful commands that
cried out gently, almost as a whisper.

“Stop me. Stop me,” he said, his voice raised a bit in intensity, the
two short syllables weighing heavily, mysteriously.

“What’s going to happen, Rich?” McKinley frowned. He seemed
concerned.

“Stop it.”

“Will you tell me first what’s going to happen? Are you going to
choke?”

“Stop me, now!”

We had given him a key word, the word release, to help him relax,
to warn us to remove him temporarily from the trance. But he either
refused to utter the word or had forgotten about it all together. I took
his pulse and saw Macek was beginning to calm. McKinley reasoned

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer | 23

with him, his voice becoming a combination of soft yet strong tones.
His words were unmistakably direct.

“Rich, you want to find out who you are, don’t you?”

Macek nodded.

“Turn back the pages, you turn back the pages. What year are you
in now?”

“Seventy-four.”

Macek began to recount the details of one of his murders, the
killing for which he was incarcerated and for which he would eventu¬
ally receive a sentence of two hundred years in prison, the brutal knif¬
ing of Paula J. Cupit, the maid at the Abbey resort. He said he was
standing outside the Abbey, that he saw the Abbey’s driveway and cars
parked there. After looking around, he strode inside the main door,
wandering the halls. He poked his head into room after room, into
door after open door, until he saw Paula. He said that merely gazing
upon her was making him nervous, “uncomfortable,” and “odd.” He
retreated from the room but returned shortly thereafter, feeling “hot,”
perspiring. Macek remembered that his heart was “racing.” He lied to
Paula, making up a story that he had lost his son, and the good-
natured hotel employee offered help in finding him. He then avoided
describing the murder completely. Dr. McKinley tried to jog his mem¬
ory so that he would recall more vital details.

“What do you have in your pocket?” McKinley asked. Inquiring
about minor objects or events tends to prod the memory more than
questions about specific scenes or bold interrogations like “How did
you kill her?”

“Comb. Key. Wallet. Ball.”

“Where is the knife?”

“Threw it away.”

“Why did you throw the knife away, Rich?”

“Blood.”

“Do you know how the knife got bloody?”

“No.”

“Do you want to find out?”

“Scared.”

24 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Macek hesitated but went on to explain how he bought a double-
edged knife at a hardware store in the quiet town of McHenry, Illinois,
the kind of town with after-work mixers at the local bank and Miss
McHenry beauty pageants at the high school. Macek went to have a
drink, to order two scotches and water at an unnamed lounge with a
Hawaiian motif. (Richard wasn’t an alcoholic, but an occasional social
drinker; no serial murderers are addicted to drugs, drink, or even
smoking.) After the drinks, Richard’s afternoon still wasn’t quite com¬
plete.

“I, I, I leave and get in the car. I’m driving to go home, but I didn’t.
The car turned and went toward the hotel.”

He described the car as if it had a mind of its own, transmogrified
and turned human, as if it controlled him. It is not uncommon for se¬
rial killers in general to believe that things have the characteristics of
people, just as sometimes they believe people are things without feel¬
ings. Macek strolled back into the hotel, then hunted the rooms to find
the maid. In the bathroom of one of the rooms, he found Paula still
working, scouring the floor, perhaps her fifteenth of the day, and he
confronted the poor woman, who was still on her knees. When she
tried to leave, he blocked her way. When she tried again, he closed the
door so there was little chance for exit and escape.

“I says, that’s all right, that’s all right. You don’t have to worry. It’s
all right. Um-hmm. Then I touched her. On her chest.”

Neither of us knew precisely what was happening. I sat within a
couple of feet of Macek, monitoring him. I noticed that his right hand
began to move, slowly rising off the desk, and then the left hand began
to rise too. His face turned crimson and his breathing rate increased
somewhat. Otherwise he appeared perfectly normal. At that point,
Macek took the heavy microphone from its stand and into his right
hand. Grasping it tightly, he lifted it high above his head. It was one of
those surreal, bizarre flashes where everything seems to slow. I should
have thought to jump up and move away, but I was trapped in the mo¬
ment. Macek himself made no sound, but the microphone came crash¬
ing down. His right hand arced near my face and then away, settling
hard on the small finger of his left hand. The sound cracked and

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer | 25

echoed through the room. But Macek was not hurt and still remained
in the trance. Everyone, from the guards to McKinley, believed Macek
didn’t need to be shackled, that he was an affable prisoner willing to
cooperate with us. We felt that shackling would somehow impede
Macek from recollection, and Macek really had advanced nicely under
hypnosis, until this.

Dr. McKinley had never experienced such a reaction and he now
looked concerned and puzzled. What happened with Macek plainly
shouldn’t have happened, no way, no how. During hypnosis, this sort
of behavior is supposed to be far more controlled and less spontaneous.
Clearly, there was turmoil occurring inside Macek’s mind, and he
could physically act it out.

We were taken aback, stunned even—but we had to maintain our
composure. We continued almost by rote, our training taking over,
until we took Macek out of the trance. Unfortunately, Macek hadn’t
spoken at all about biting, raping, and ritually cutting Paula J. Cupit.

As we left the facility, we looked at what Macek had done with the
microphone as a mere aberration. But again, the image of Macek slam¬
ming down the microphone wended its way into my senses as I walked
to the car. I played the scene again in my head. Before Macek threw
down the mike, I was unable to detect any clue that there was some¬
thing wrong. I mean, I am a highly intuitive person who has encoun¬
tered plenty of really aggressive people in my day-to-day work in
psychiatry. Most of the time, I will get some signal that things are not
going well. When that is the case, I will change tactics or pose a ques¬
tion in an unconventional way, modifying the tone of my voice, em¬
ploying words that are more soothing and appealing to the individual.
When I’m working with someone, as I was in this case, I’d quietly sig¬
nal to him to bring Macek out of the trance. But Macek’s outburst
came completely out of the blue. There was no warning, no change of
inflection, no strange look on his face, absolutely nothing that would
have indicated that this display of violence was about to ensue. Though
I believed Macek’s emotions would not flare up again, I decided to
have McKinley bring along a smaller cassette recorder next time, one
with an almost weightless plastic microphone—just in case.

26 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

As I parted ways with the discomfited McKinley, I hoped that
Macek would not again become so unrestrained under hypnosis. On
the way back home, driving past cornfields and dairy farms, I con¬
vinced myself to believe it.

I looked into Macek’s criminal and family history dating back to 1967
and discovered he was not very close to his father, a gruff, successful,
and self-made man whose ownership of a brewery lifted his family to
an upper-middle-class existence. He was very strict, rarely permitting
Richard to date and employing physical means of control and disci¬
pline with all family members. He hit. He slapped. He punched his
sons and his wife until they lived in a good deal of fear.

Macek’s crimes began early, according to Illinois police reports. As
a young boy in grammar school in the suburban town of Elmwood,
Illinois, Macek was arrested for stealing the panties from a neighbors
clothesline. Once he took them, he chewed on the crotches. Appear¬
ances notwithstanding, this was not a sexual act. Rather, it had more
to do with the still babylike Macek enjoying the touch, feel, and smell
of the softer cotton fabric the crotch was made of, avoiding the coarser
cotton in the rest of the panty. This is something some serial killers like
to do. John Wayne Gacy placed his mother’s panties in a paper bag and
hid them under his porch, often taking them out and caressing them
for comfort. You might ask, well, why not touch or chew a T-shirt? A
T-shirt just isn’t as soft as panties.

In 1966, Macek’s father died of a myocardial infarction in a hospi¬
tal while being treated for hypertension. Not many months later,
Macek was arrested for voyeurism, Peeping Tom incidents in which
he’d perch by night near a window with a small handheld telescope,
watching the sleeping woman inside. Over time, Macek’s crimes be¬
came increasingly violent and included charges of beating up women.
In 1974, the infant daughter of his girlfriend with whom he was stay¬
ing was found dead on a heating pad, burnt to the extent that her poor
body looked like a sausage that had burst through its casing. Macek
was never convicted of this death, but I think he did it. By 1976, I be¬
lieve that he had murdered eight women, although police had gotten

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer | 27

him to confess only to the murder of the maid. In all of these cases, the
murder or attack was sadistic, sexual, and violent, including incidents
of stabbing, drowning, strangulation, mutilation, biting, and/or
necrophilia.

On the following morning, we gathered again in Waupun, this time
in a second-floor conference room, an immense, spacious room in
which the five-foot-four, 192-pound Macek seemed inconspicuous,
tiny. He sat, waiting alone at a long, polished oak table, again un¬
shackled. With a guard outside the door, I felt comfortable, focused,
and ready.

I resolved to use this session to probe the killings of Nancy Loss-
man and her three-year-old daughter, Lisa, found dead in 1974 in their
Crystal Lake, Illinois, apartment. Nancy’s body was discovered nude
and battered. Macek had strangled her with the cord from a Venetian
blind. There were, gouged in her right breast, substantial bite marks,
and there was evidence of necrophilia, according to the coroner’s re¬
port. He drowned the little girl, Lisa, in a toilet bowl and, bizarrely,
placed towels in the bowl as well. But he left Nancy’s sleeping son
alone. Macek never tried to kill a boy or a man. He preferred to kill
women. Just as substance abusers have their drug of choice, Macek had
his murder victims of choice.

As McKinley led Macek to recall these disturbing events, the crim¬
inal remained relaxed under hypnosis, and all seemed well. Within a
few minutes, Macek began to remember more.

He stood there with lighter fluid in his hand, and he plotted to
burn everything around him to cover his tracks. As Macek brought to
mind the fire he started in the utility room in the Lossman apartment,
he said he rummaged about to find a match to ignite the blaze. In¬
wardly, I found this strange, primarily because Macek was not a stupid
man; surely he knew that a small can of lighter fluid would mainly
cause a smoky fire that wouldn’t last and wouldn’t destroy the crime
scene. But as I contemplated this, something changed.

“Ooooh!” Macek’s groan was piercing.

“AHHHHHHH!” He was clearly uncomfortable, tense and sweating.

“It hurts. The fire!” Macek exclaimed that he was in agonizing pain,

28 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

that he was immersed in the flames, that he could feel them lash at his
skin. As I looked at Macek, I felt he was beginning to exist inside the
past, a past that we might not be able to control with hypnosis.

“AHHHHH!” he roared. Hands that had been hanging by his side
tensed into fists, and then he cradled his right hand in his left. It was
happening again! McKinley looked alarmed and loosened his tie.

Macek had burned his hand in the fire, a flare-up that he saw and
felt as lucidly as the terrible moments when the murders of the mother
and daughter had occurred. I took stock of the room around us. Cer¬
tainly nothing there had changed. No one had entered, not a guard,
not anyone, and the temperature was the same. Then my eyes focused
on Macek’s hand. On his fingers, I saw red blisters, big as dimes, rise
from the inferno he was experiencing in his head. I closely examined
everything, looking all around to make sure there was no outside
source—a hidden match, a pocket lighter, a cigarette—of heat. There
was nothing. I was frightened at what seemed to be an almost super¬
natural event.

Something had to be done immediately. We interrupted the trance
and said to Macek, “Let’s take a break.” I kept staring at the blisters that
remained on his hand. At that moment, I chose to end any further hyp¬
notic sessions. The whole process had disintegrated, and the risk of con¬
tinuing was tremendous. Macek could lose control, and the cost could
be a total erosion of his very tenuous state of mind. Or he could assault
someone within the prison hospital, forcing authorities to put him in
seclusion where he couldn’t be seen, and putting an end to my scientific
research just as it had begun. Then and there, I had to admit that Macek
may never have been adequately hypnotized. For a moment, I won¬
dered whether part of his brain was conscious and controlling us just as
we believed we were exploring the depths of his mind. There in the con¬
fines of Waupun State Hospital, I began to understand that I was walk¬
ing on a razor’s edge as long as I worked with serial murderers. Because
so many things could go wrong, I felt if I made one false move or slip,
I could be shredded.

There was something going on that was completely out of the
realm of what I had learned or had ever experienced. We were trekking

Dangerous Terrain: Hypnotizing a Serial Killer | 29

into the unknown, and it was not safe to be there. I did take consola¬
tion in something Sigmund Freud wrote in 1905: “No one who, like
me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit
the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come
through the struggle unscathed.” I believe that what happened with
Macek had to do with the suspension of the boundary of time. If you
think about it, when Macek was focused and reexperiencing his past
murders, time ceased to exist. Back in that traumatic moment where
his life played itself over in three dimensions, Macek was capable of re¬
living his horrors as if they were happening in real life. Again, he didn’t
have a cigarette to burn himself. He didn’t have anything. He was back
there in the past, as if nothing had ever changed, and his hand was, for
all intents and purposes, burned. I’ve already mentioned that there is a
part of the mind called the preconscious, the place in the brain that
stores mental contents that are not conscious but could be, like mem¬
ories that can be recovered. But they aren’t quite near enough for im¬
mediate mining. The preconscious can also include the hints of
memories—traces, parts, pieces, rather than the whole memory itself.

As I mentioned, you can never get to the unconscious, according to
theory. But is there something somewhere within the boundary to that
wall that’s so permeable that it seeps through into the consciousness of
the patient? What part of the mind allows a human to go back and forth
from the conscious to the preconscious occasionally as freely as one goes
from the dining room to the kitchen? I think it is a boundary so fluid
that you can’t tell what is real time to the serial killer. So it was for
Richard Otto Macek, and for many others too, who would talk about
these bits of remembrances, but only after dozens of hours of probing.

For our own safety, we called two young guards to take Macek
away. I recounted the eerie tale of what had just happened.

“What was really weird were the blisters that appeared on his hand.
Take a look,” I said.

One guard looked dumbfounded, but he did not believe what he
saw. Convincing these people who saw everything as black and white,
rather than in shades of gray, was next to impossible. After some con¬
fusion, an angry look fell over his face.

30 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re just a faker! This
is all fake. Fake.”

The other guard said, “You did this to him yourself. You burned his
hands. You want us to believe THIS? You’re full of crap.”

Some people have asked, well, if this really happened, where’s the
photo of his hand? But getting a camera past security would have been
impossible. And I think the tape of the session speaks for itself.

Though I’m sure this information filtered up to the superintendent,
I never heard a word from him or other prison officials. I’m sure they
didn’t want anyone on the outside to know we were talking to Macek,
nor did they want this admittedly bizarre story to seep out into
Waupun and beyond. I could almost hear them say, “Don’t make my
prison anything out of the ordinary. Don’t you shake things up. But,
hey, aren’t you cute for cornin’ in with all of your investigations and all
that science?”

THREE

BREAKING THROUGH
MACEK’S MIND

I t was a dimly lit dive that reeked of malt, mildew, and cigarette
smoke. My eyes took a moment to adjust. Along the dark old bar
and at each one of the rickety tables was a tin bowl full of Wisconsin
cheddar cheese spread and a plastic basket of Keebler crackers. I had
walked into this watering hole on the side of the road to Waupun, Wis¬
consin, to meet with FBI Special Agent Louis Tomaselli, but he hadn’t
yet arrived. Somewhat out of place in my gray-blue skirt and dark blue
blazer, I ordered bourbon straight up and sat at a small table. As the
jukebox played a Johnny Cash song, Tomaselli, dressed casually in blue
jeans and a plaid shirt, requested a whiskey and sat down.

I gave him the update. “We’re making progress with Richard
Macek. He’s beginning to open up. In addition, he’s sending letters al¬
most every day. They’re single-spaced and handwritten, up to twenty
pages each. Sometimes he sends letters three times a day. I’m not sure
I believe it yet, but he says he trusts me.”

Tomaselli nodded, spread some cheese on a cracker, ate it in one
bite, took a gulp of his drink, and informed me that Macek would
likely be transferred to a prison in Illinois. “It’ll be sometime soon.
They have enough to warrant extradition for the Lossman killings.”

32 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“Do you know when?”

Tomaselli shook his head. He glanced around the place and stared
at a neon beer sign. Then he tried to regale me with macho stories of
his latest case, in which he was able to infiltrate a Wisconsin motorcyle
gang, to ride with them and become accepted as an insider. A few min¬
utes later, he boasted about his training exploits at the new FBI center
in Quantico, Virginia.

He leaned forward and bragged, “It’s got three hundred and eighty-
five acres. Huge. It’s completely wooded. Completely secure. It even
has its own mock city to use for training purposes.”

It was obvious to me that Tomaselli had his own agenda—getting a
conviction—and that he wasn’t interested in hearing much of a report
on my progress with Richard Macek, let alone any details that didn’t
serve his own needs. He really wasn’t listening to what I had to say
about Macek. I felt most of the meeting was useless and was glad when
it was over.

Still, I did learn that Macek was going to be extradited to a prison
fifty miles northwest of Chicago in the McHenry County town of
Woodstock, Illinois. While the timing was still up in the air, it was crit¬
ical that I continue my sessions with Macek on an accelerated sched¬
ule. I wrote and phoned the prison hospital in Waupun and asked the
superintendent to inform me of the date of the imminent transfer to
Illinois for the killing of Nancy and Lisa Lossman.

But when it finally happened, I was the last to know.

Each day or so, Macek mailed letters to me. Once or twice they were
typed—when he was angry with me and felt I somehow “didn’t de¬
serve” the intimacy of a handwritten note. The letters themselves cen¬
tered primarily around three things. He whined about recurring aches
and pains, including chronic headaches, which were likely psychoso¬
matic, perhaps due to overwhelming, disorganized feelings about his
crimes or worry about his forthcoming trials. He didn’t regret his
crimes; he just whined about his circumstance, writing, “I don’t see
how I could do this” and “Why did this happen to me?” The letters
were also filled with the trite details of everyday prison life. He told me

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 33

when he woke, what he ate, when he went to sleep, the song that
played on the radio, about decorating the prison Christmas tree for the
holidays. Even though I felt we d have a breakthrough soon, many of
his letters were full of complaining and banalities:

Dear Dr. Morrison,

I have just arrived to my room after our visit. Right at this mo¬
ment, I feel very confused and frustrated. . . . Right now I have a very
cold and empty feeling inside. And I feel very scared! My heart is rac¬
ing! I have the feeling that I am being cheeted or pushed along. NO!
NOT by you or any of the other Doctors. But by Louis (Tomaselli).
Don’t get excited or nervous but I feel at times I were dead. KEEP
THAT TO YOURSELF, OK? But I’m so ashamed and fearful for
what I have done, else where at other times. As I feel now I can say
NO, I don’t know anything or did anything, but at the same time. I’m
not sure If I did do anything else! To me it doesn’t sound good or so
to say it sounds dumm . . .

I would like to help and please everybody. But what can I do. Now
I feel like crying. And that is embarrassing. TO ME, IT IS EMBAR¬
RASSING! I just went into a black. And I feel like tearing up this let¬
ter. Becaues I feel dumm. Just like I did when I tried to write to
(another doctor). I have to subsutute words becase of spelling, and
then losing thought of what I want to say!! And the words or frases I
want to use. I guess I’ll end my letter for now. I feel tired and un¬
comfortable. You see feeling like this I have to keep to myself. Because
the Doctors here are quick to put a patient on heavy medication and
I’m not about to be turned into a ZOMBI! . . .

Thank you for your time and interest in my case and or me.

Respectfully yours,

Richard O. Macek

When he felt he had gotten more comfortable with me and that he
considered us to be friends, he became demanding, asking me to bring
him such things as “Coast to Coast deodorant soap, Efferdent denture
tablets, Alka-Seltzer and Alberto balsam shampoo.” The most telling

34 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

characteristic of the letters was the fact that he did not really commu¬
nicate in them: many of the sentences contained generalities mixed
with cliches. The dispatches had little meaning, kind of like the bab¬
ble you hear from a celebrity who doesn’t want to express anything to
the press but knows something must be said. Macek wrote what he
thought he was expected to write, what he felt a prison official would
prefer him to write. The letters were not vetted by officials because of
the privacy laws surrounding the doctor/patient relationship, but they
were more often than not impulsive rants with little punctuation and
words with misspellings like amagin for imagine. Gradually, it became
evident to me that they were intentional and may have reflected a need
to be in the limelight: “Please look at me. I am different.” Starved for
attention for much of his life, Macek wanted more than to be known.
He wanted to be famous. His dreams would include fantasies about
riding in limousines and Cadillacs and living in mansions.

When he spoke to me, it was the same thing. Cognitively, he was
disturbed when he attempted to communicate. He would use words in
a somewhat awkward formal construction like “he had thought I was
dumm.” They were also interspersed with gross errors in syntax and
the use of slang. The structure of Macek’s sentences frequently disinte¬
grated into annoying non sequiturs. If you asked Macek a question
such as “How many days are there in a year?” he might say “Two hun¬
dred and five.” If you asked him why, he might say, “The thought just
flashed through my mind.” It showed that Macek had very little inter¬
nal self-control at times. He couldn’t take that second or two to think
before answering. He was not dim-witted; he had an above-average in¬
telligence. But snap judgments dominated his chatter, so much so that
his awareness, insight, and ability to discern were whittled down to
sudden declarations that were full of mistakes. It’s a kind of topsy-turvy
way of being that stems from within, a chaos that eventually leads to
the expression of uncontrollable fury. It’s not frustration. In fact, the
cause for such rage is not specific. It is nothing that we can yet pin¬
point or know with conviction.

Macek became obsessed with worry about his life and health in these
letters, but the strange syntax and spelling remained when he wrote:

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 35

I woke up choking. My heart felt like it was jumping or trying to
jump out of my chest. Cold sweat all over. But my body felt warm.

My face felt like of Billions of pins were sticking me in the face. I had
a dream, or nightmare if anything. I just seen my life pass my eyes. I’m
dead. And I seen how it happened. I dreamed after all of everything
was finished in court, ect. I got old fast; I started deteareating from
within. Every hour, day, week, seem to be racing by me. I can’t keep
up I’m alone. All alone now one to turn to, no one to hold and tell
them I Love them! I look for help. But people walk past me and just
look and keep on walking. My skin is just hanging on my bones. But
my mind is still active. I see doctors coming at me with needles full of
Drugs, liquid and pills poored down my throat. I see myself scream¬
ing, trying to tell them is is the wrong stuff.

Additionally in his letters, he began to flirt with me, doing things like
calling me “Boops.” Since he was safely behind bars, I gave it little notice.

It was appropriate, though, that I learned from Macek himself about
his transfer to Illinois. He wrote a short note that simply said he had
been moved and his address had changed. “When are you coming to
see me?” he asked. Due to my workload I hadn’t seen Macek for over
a month, but Macek was right. It was now time to see him in Illinois.
After calling and writing repeatedly, I received permission from the au¬
thorities in rural Woodstock, Illinois, to continue my meetings with
Macek. The Woodstock in Illinois was part of McHenry County itself.
Full of rolling, farm-filled countryside, it had 111,000 residents, and
farmland there sold for $1.50 an acre—$1.80 if a farmer got lucky.
Traveling down those old, empty roads, I rarely saw another car or an¬
other human. Though the sun shone, the lack of humanity for miles
upon miles was, well, creepy. After making the trip from Madison, I
slowed as I passed the bright, towering Woodstock Opera House,
where a young Orson Welles and Paul Newman had once acted and
which had just been renovated. Next to the courthouse in the pretty
town square, I passed a run-down, shuttered jail next to the court¬
house. Continuing on, I found the brand-new facility north of town.

36 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

While the county jail was just a few years old, it was minuscule,
housing about thirty persons at the time Macek was a prisoner. In a
nondescript meeting area, surrounded by thick, heavy, but not bullet¬
proof glass, I sat waiting for Macek. I wished they hadn’t given him a
job as a cook wielding a knife in the kitchen; after all, he had killed
with a knife and made his ritualistic cuttings something of a hallmark
of his murders. But that was the way the prison system worked in the
town—it sometimes defied any semblance of logic or security. Macek
walked in and seated himself at a small, gray metal table bolted to the
wall. It took a moment to sink in, but I was stunned to see draped on
his shoulder, almost as if it were a proud weapon of war, a white terry-
cloth towel. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me. Macek had strangled the
maid at the Abbey with a white towel. And he had stuffed towels into
the toilet . . . pushing them on top of three-year-old Lisa Lossman
until her young life had ended, a crime for which he could receive an
additional two hundred to four hundred years in jail. This gesture with
the towel was a stratagem of power for him, as if to say, “I’m in charge
here, no one else. I can take your life with a towel. At the very least, I
can play with your mind whenever I want to.” I wasn’t afraid, but I was
angry.

I went directly to the attending guard, who was relaxing and read¬
ing a newspaper. In no uncertain terms, I asked, “Can you please re¬
move that towel?” Now, Macek was well known even in this rural area
because of the many newspaper accounts about him, including those
dubbing him “The Mad Biter,” as if he were a vampire. There had even
been some Hollywood inquiry into doing a movie about Macek’s life
and crimes. But I’m sure this guard was oblivious to the fine points of
the particular murders, including the towel. He regarded me curiously,
as if I were paranoid.

“You want what?”

“We have to get rid of the towel.”

Macek himself looked at me as though he didn’t understand why I
would be upset by the towel. Yet he also knew games wouldn’t work
with me, so he handed over the towel to the guard without so much as
a peep.

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 37

For hours, I sat near Macek, digging into his psyche. On the sur¬
face, he talked about how he viewed himself as a “good father” who
“loves all creatures.” He said he had “a lot of love for kids” and that he’d
give his “right arm for them if there’s anything that they needed.” In
reality, he never abused his kids or his wife, and he acted like a very car¬
ing husband and father. He made them presents, and he brought home
a menagerie of pets for them. Most serial killers rarely abuse those very
close to them because their family, the very idea of a wife and kids, is
part of a structure that keeps serial killers “normal,” at least while
they’re with them. Macek’s family life was, as far as I could tell from
speaking with his quiet wife, Sandy, generally unremarkable, and he
doted on his three children.

As a child himself, Macek hailed from the Chicago suburbs and en¬
joyed a middle-class upbringing. He went to parochial school, where
he tried to impress the kids in gym class with feats of strength. He once
told the Detroit News that his mother and father had “two homes and
fours cars and three boats. And not a penny in the bank.” Macek did
call his father abusive, saying his father hit him and didn’t want him to
date, but he wasn’t much more protective and violent than a lot of fa¬
thers. According to Macek, his mother was never quite satisfied with
him, but he did not harbor hate for either of them. He did indeed care
for Sandy and the kids as best as he could, with jobs as a machinist,
cook, and truck driver.

As we continued our talk, Macek appeared to be cooperative, help¬
ful, and easygoing. But his charisma and seeming zest for life disinte¬
grated once we got past the three-hour mark—especially when the
interviews were uninterrupted. The breakdown was most apparent
when I confronted him with his controlling manipulative behavior or
his occasional lying. Macek’s personality then became this kaleido¬
scopic mix of belligerence and guile. To throw things off-kilter, he de¬
manded I get him things like water or toiletries or that I talk to the
guard so he wouldn’t stare at him. He would burst into a fit of rude¬
ness or boorishness. It was vehement, and it came out of nowhere.
“You’re full of shit!” he’d scream. It was after an outburst that he might
say something important.

38 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

And then, hours into the session, he sat forward, almost expres¬
sionless, and cautiously admitted, “I—I can’t tell if people are alive or
dead unless they stop fighting me.”

About a week later in early September 1977, I prepared to visit Macek
again. I finished work late in the day and drove to Woodstock in the
evening. Soon it was black all around, and I had turned onto a two-lane
back road to find the local motel at which I’d made a reservation. Since
there were no street lamps anywhere along the twisting route, I switched
on my bright beams. Wisps of ground fog hung over the road, forming
recognizable shapes as I drew near, only to vanish as I drove through them.

When I found the motel, it was clear, even at night, that the two-
story place was in disrepair. I paid for the room and picked up my keys.
With my luggage in hand, I walked up two flights of creaky stairs. The
motel was practically deserted, and its manager was certainly in no
danger of having to get up from his TV viewing to click on its red neon
NO VACANCY sign. Just a half dozen cars were stopped in the parking
spaces, and it seemed as though they’d been there forever.

The door to the room opened with a whine. From the rugs to the
bed, the room was furnished in a dull brown decor. On the headboard
was one of those ancient massaging machines that cost a quarter to op¬
erate. On inspection, the room was anything but secure. The door
seemed cardboard thin, and the picture window almost welcomed
thieves. I pulled the drapes tightly shut. As I readied for bed, I had the
constant feeling that something was wrong. I checked the closets. I
bent over to peek under the bed. It was on a platform. Nothing there,
nothing at all, I assured myself. After inspecting the bathroom, in¬
cluding the shower, I pulled aside the drapes to look out onto the park¬
ing lot. Nothing. Nothing there.

Then the phone rang, blaring. I hesitated, resisting the impulse to
pick up the receiver. No one I knew had an inkling that I was in rural
Illinois. Finally I picked up the receiver, thinking it must be the motel
manager with some message about checkout time.

“Hello?”

“How are you?”

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 39

“Who is this?” I may have recognized the voice, that flat, soft voice,
but it couldn’t possibly be him.

“It’s Richie.”

“What— It can’t be.” I thought I would drop the phone. Instead, I
sat down on the bed.

“Sure it is.”

“Where are you calling from?” How did Macek deduce I was here,
at this particular place?

“Well, if you look out your window, you’ll see I’m down there . . .
I’m right out there.” I tried to think logically. How could I get help?
“I’m in the phone booth. All you have to do is go to your window and
look to your left and I’m down there.”

We were both silent then. I didn’t want to look. I wondered how
close my car was and whether I would need to make a break for it.

“Go look. I bet you can’t. Bet you won’t. Go look.” I was becom¬
ing really nervous, still struggling with my thoughts to believe that this
couldn’t possibly be real. But at the same time it was real. Everything
was completely blurred, that fine line between reality and nonreality. I
moved to the window and pulled back the thick curtain.

It was there, a shiny metal phone booth with a fluorescent light,
flitting moths, and spiderwebs. The phone booth was there. He, how¬
ever, was not.

“But you’re not there.” I had fallen for the ruse and I was angry.

“I bet I got you going, didn’t I?”

“This really is not funny.”

“I know it’s not funny, but I decided to do it anyway.”

“Well, first of all, how did you get to a telephone?”

“The guards let me.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“I’m calling from the guard station.”

“How could you be doing that? You’re not supposed to have access
to a phone.”

“I kind of have access. I can get access whenever I need it.”

“How did you find me?”

“Oh, I have my ways.” It was so unpleasant. But I didn’t get off

40 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

the phone right away because I wanted to tell him his behavior was
inappropriate.

“This is not comfortable for me. You know it’s not comfortable.
You know I’m scheduled to see you tomorrow. We’re going to discuss
this further tomorrow.”

His was kind of a nonreaction.

“Well, what do you mean, you didn’t like it? It’s me calling. You
should like that.”

I got into bed and tried to work on my notes regarding the con¬
versations we’d had recently. He had said that as a child he’d had hor¬
rible dreams of being attacked by a pink eraser. While trying to make
sense of what this meant, I remained irritated with myself; I couldn’t
believe I fell for Macek’s prank. Yet I was frightened because I’d never
had that kind of experience before. Even after the phone call, I had to
convince myself that he wasn’t there. “He’s not here,” I repeated to my¬
self. “He’s not here.” It was a reality check I had to make. I felt the need
to inspect the closets again, all of the corners and the shelves above,
and to find out what was inside the platform beneath the bed. I really
wanted to do this. And I really wanted to look out at the phone booth
again. I finally told myself I didn’t have to.

“He’s not here. ”

“Richard, we can’t have this happen again.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. He sounded a little hurt.

“You know what I mean.”

“I guess I do.”

“If something like that ever happens again, our sessions will end. I
will stop trying to help you.”

Again, he had a kind of nonreaction, but it sunk in, and his scary
games came to an end. Despite his shenanigans, I was making progress
in coaxing him to recall the details of one of his more horrendous
crimes. It was one for which another, probably innocent man was
being blamed. Not only was Richard Milone accused of the murders,
but he stood trial, was convicted, and sentenced to 90 to 175 years in
prison at the Menard Penitentiary in Chester, Illinois.

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 41

It was a repulsive crime because young Sally Kandel, a popular
freshman at Glenbard North High School in Carol Stream, Illinois,
was only fourteen years old when her life was taken. According to the
case file, the fresh-faced teen with pretty long hair and a captivating
smile was a five-foot-six member of the track team, an athlete who had
won a Presidential Fitness Award for two years straight. On the
evening of September 12, 1972, at about 6 P.M., Sally ate a dinner of
broiled round steak, french fries, and banana cake.

“I’m going out for a bike ride,” Sally said, after finishing her dessert.
“But leave the dishes because I’ll be in to do them by seven o’clock.”

“You better be sure to be home by seven,” said Cynthia, her mother.

“Even earlier, Mom, because Bonanza starts at seven.”

The last time her parents saw Sally, she was wearing blue jeans, a
white turtleneck body sweater, sneakers, and a blue windbreaker. At
5:50 A.M. the next morning, one of the DuPage County deputy sher¬
iffs discovered the teen, lifeless, between the third and fourth rows of
corn in a muddy, waterlogged field over two miles from her home—a
distance she had never before traveled by bicycle. The muck there was
so like quicksand that deputy Donald Schmitt complained he ruined
his shoes as he surveyed the death scene. Next to the farm was a gravel
road, wet, bumpy, hard to ride on a bike. Nearby, the bike itself was
found, its front wheel bent and crooked.

Blood still seeped from the back of Sally’s head when the police
found her. After examination, the coroner stated that she had died
from severe head injuries, a skull fracture and a gash that made its way
into the brain. In his report, the coroner counted over twenty lacera¬
tions to her head. It was determined that Sally Kandel was beaten with
a sixteen-inch grocery cart handle found near the road and upon which
were discovered several hairs and much blood. There was a tear mea¬
suring fourteen and a half inches in front of her jeans and into the left
of the crotch area. On her right inner thigh was a jagged 3.5-by-4-
centimeter bite that cut through the skin, determined to have been cre¬
ated after Sally had died. Part of Sally’s thumb had been cut off. And
on her eyelids were two slits each about two centimeters long, also
made after she died.

42 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Richard Milone, a low-level warehouse worker scraping to get by,
had never before been involved in any serious wrongdoing, although
there had been some minor run-ins with the law. However, he had
cleaned his car right after the murder, preparing to offer it for sale. He
had indeed kept a grocery cart handle—the same one used in the mur¬
der—in his car for protection. He explained that he lost it while run¬
ning in a cornfield. Nevertheless, the bulk of the case against him
revolved around the testimony of dentists who felt that the bite mark
on Sally Kandel’s thigh matched Milone’s cuspid tooth. However, Dr.
Lowell J. Levine, a New York ondontologist, testified that the look of
the teeth didn’t really match. In fact, he felt that they were closer to an
abnormality found in Richard Macek’s teeth, an extremely long and
sharp bicuspid tooth. Beyond this, the ritualistic cutting in the eyelids
was the distinguishing symbol of Richard Macek, who had done the
same thing to Paula J. Cupit, the maid at the Abbey resort. Macek had
also hit women in the head before, such as twenty-four-year-old
Sharon Kulisek, whom he jumped in a Laundromat. She remained in
a coma for seven long days before reawakening to describe for police
how she was beaten and to describe who attacked her.

Macek and I had traversed the varied planes of the Sally Kandel case
as if it were a game of three-dimensional chess. Round and round, up
and down, backward and forward, we went. Macek couldn’t remem¬
ber. Macek remembered a detail. Then he wasn’t sure of the detail.
Then he took back the detail he remembered. He hemmed, he hawed,
he flirted, he changed the subject, he rambled. He whined about his
wife, his case, his cell, the guards, the newspaper reporters, his lawyer,
how he once struck fear into the Illinois state governor upon their
meeting in the prison kitchen. He changed the subject constantly. At
times he was adamant, inflexible, incorrigible. I plodded on during
each four- to-six hour session, trying to stop his soliloquizing with
questions of my own, then listening to him for long stretches, then try¬
ing to get him back on track. I would ask the tough questions, over and
over again.

Through all this, he continued with his long letters, which had be¬
come increasingly, well, friendly. Once Macek wrote:

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 43

At different times. I’ve seen myself just pick you up and carry you
into my cell. Put you on the bed, and we just layed there and talk . . .

Yes, me laying on my back you laying on my chest just talking, any¬
thing that comes to mind. No kisses, not fondling nothing just good
honest talking Why in bed? It’s one of those few places where you
can actually relax in privacy and talk without being uncomfortable
at all. At least it’s been one of my favorite places that and the couch
also.

Overall, there were dozens of letters like this. I knew that Macek
was not at all “falling in love” with me, not for one second. More, it
was a combination of what he felt he was supposed to say. In his mind,
a man should say these things to a woman. But he didn’t mean them
within his self. It was more like a child reading words from a book in
class, concentrating on pronunciation and the sound of his words
rather than feeling or absorbing the true meaning of the words. But
unlike a child, he had no self.

Forty-five minutes past midnight on June 9, 1977, Macek sat down
in his cell and wrote me a two-page letter that was, to say the least, dis¬
concerting. He began with the usual “I want to see you very badly
More than you can amagin.” He then went into a mixed-up rant that
read: My headaches are increasing. My tempers blows ski [sky] high . . . My
strength seems to increase 3 to 4 times. ’’Near the end of the page, after talk¬
ing about his children and without a break to begin a new paragraph, he
wrote, “Sandy I miss you so very much. I always love you always! I’m so
very lonely without you. . . . Remember Daddy loves his little girl very
much. Love Your Husband, Richard.

As I read his words, I don’t think I’ve felt anything eerier. No hor¬
ror movie, no strange insect crawling over me in the night, no peculiar
stranger at the door could have elicited a more visceral response from
me. I seemed to have become his wife, and the two of us, the real wife
and the doctor, were somehow indistinguishable to him. Sandy was a
quiet, nondescript person with dark hair who doted on Richard, at
least before he was put in jail. I was straightforward and had blond
hair. We certainly didn’t look or act alike. How could he have mixed

44 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

up the two of us? But as I thought about it, I told myself that Richard
had just forgotten to whom he was writing. Thoughts somehow had
melded two people into one. Lucky me.

Spring turned to summer, which turned to fall. In Madison in late Oc¬
tober, there were little ghosts and jack-o’-lantern cutouts hung
throughout the hospital. On Halloween, excited children donned their
masks and costumes. In my building, witches and goblins, unable to
contain their glee, paraded door to door for Halloween candy.

But Macek had his own Halloween horror story to relive. When he
told me how he killed Sally Kandel, his recollection was so lucid and
startling that I suggested to him that he write it down in the presence
of a prison official.

So, late in the evening of November 3, 1977, with the chief jailer
standing nearby as his witness, Richard Macek began to write from his
cell on lined paper. With his penmanship full of careful loops making
words that were perfectly legible, he wrote:

Late afternoon on the 12th of September, 1972. The weather was
foggy and damp. I was driving and had to go to the bathroom. There
was nothing close at the time and I stopped the car and got out and
walked into the Woods to go.

There was a girl walking with her bike.

I began to talk to her. Then I hit her on the back of the head on
the right side, with a black bar, like a grocery cart handle.

I took her into the field and beat her further in the head area . . .

She was wearing a wind breaker jacket and slacks.

She was laying on her back. Her right leg was raised higher than
the other.

And I bit her on the right thigh . . .

I had at one time an extra pointed tooth in the right hand side of
my mouth.

Along with the rest of my teeth, that extra pointed tooth was ex¬
tracted with the others by Dr. Walsh an oral surgeon.

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 45

The small-town dentist himself explained that only a couple of
Macek’s teeth needed pulling. But Macek exhibited one of the primary
traits of a serial killer: the conniving ability to get his own way, even
without violence. He convinced Dr. Walsh to yank out all of his teeth.

William J. Cowlin, the state’s attorney for McHenry County who
was in charge of the Kandel case, refused to believe anything contained
within the Macek confession. Unlike the small group of officials, in¬
cluding the FBI’s Tomaselli, who believed in Milone’s innocence,
Cowlin was that tough-as-nails type who wouldn’t give credence to a
murder unless it happened in front of his face. Admittedly, Macek had
toyed with prison and police officials, often saying something and then
denying it the next time he was interviewed. He had done this so many
times that Cowlin was certain he was crying wolf. And Cowlin already
had someone in jail, someone who was convicted by a jury. He didn’t
want to spend any more of the state’s money on a case he saw as fin¬
ished. But I believed Macek. In that confession were three salient facts
that Macek could not have gathered from newspaper accounts he may
have read about Sally Kandel’s murder. There was no way that Macek
could have known she wore a windbreaker on the night of her death,
or that she was lying on her back and her right leg was raised higher
than her left leg, or that there were bite marks on her right thigh.

The sad reality is one that haunts me to this day: Milone languished
in jail for decades, more than a quarter of his life wasted behind bars.
I had done what law enforcement had asked me to do. I had gotten
Richard Otto Macek to admit to the crime that those present in that
first meeting at Waupun hospital so frantically wanted to pin on
Macek. And they sat on the admission, acted as though it never hap¬
pened. When my work was completed and I had logged over four hun¬
dred hours face-to-face with Richard Macek, I never received one
acknowledgment for the information I’d gotten, not from Cowlin, not
from Tomaselli, not from anyone. Once given the Kandel confession,
they all darted away like cockroaches scattering when the light is
flicked on. After years of thought upon the subject, I can conclude
only that the real reason was pure ego, which pervaded everything

46 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

from the prison system to the court system, ego that let an innocent
man languish in a trap. It all seemed so iron-fisted to me. Milone was
found guilty. Cowlin would not believe that what he had done with
Milone’s case was wrong. So that was it. End of case, even if prosecu¬
tor, judge, and jury were wrong.

Fortunately, Milone had other methods with which to prove his in¬
nocence. Dental evidence presented in 1994 to the Seventh Circuit
United States Court of Appeals suggested that it was Macek, not
Milone, who had bitten Sally Kandel’s thigh and killed her. The evi¬
dence served up at Milone’s trial linking Milone’s dentition to the bite
mark found on Sally’s thigh was sorely incorrect. The brand-new prac¬
tice of forensic ondontology, what I view as the real basis of the origi¬
nal case against Milone, was not well refined in 1973, the date Milone
first went to court. As Milone made his appeals, reliable, expert testi¬
mony in advanced forensic ondontology proved the mark on Sally’s
thigh matched the teeth of Richard Macek (which Dr. Walsh, the den¬
tist, had actually saved). Then there was nine-year-old Linda Sue Rose-
boom who “reaffirmed her trial testimony” that Milone’s Dodge Polara
was not the car that she spied in her driveway the evening Sally Kan-
del was killed. In his confession, Macek wrote, “At the time, I was driv¬
ing a 1964 Chevy Impala a cream color. It was a heated up on the right
side. And the door outer panels were caved or pushed in.” This was the
car that Linda Sue Roseboom saw. On the basis of this forensic evi¬
dence, Milone was eventually freed—after having served twenty years
in jail for a crime he did not commit. He would try to reenter a life
that was so mistakenly and unnecessarily interrupted and placed on
hold. And though he would go on because there was nothing else to
do, he would look upon that time long ago with occasional sadness . . .
and much bitterness.

As wonderful as it was to hear that Milone was no longer stuck be¬
hind bars, it still bothers me that none of the courts ever saw Macek’s
confession. Thinking back on the crimes of Richard Macek, I have
come to the conclusion that his acts of homicide were not externally
precipitated. No one had done anything to him to make him lash out.
No one had abused him sexually as a child, nor had they taken away

Breaking Through Macek’s Mind | 47

his house, nor had he been fired from his job. Nor had a small thing
set him off—like a tax bill or the way someone looked askance at him.
Nothing you might consider as having any meaning to him had gone
particularly awry. As far as I could see, there was never a distinct mo¬
tive to any of his crimes. Sure, there were manufactured motives.
Lawyers and police speculated that Macek was a victim of severe
parental abuse and that he was a sexual deviant or that he couldn’t deal
with the idea of his father’s death, though these ideas were never
proven.

But I have never discovered in Richard Macek a true motive, one
that made sense, one that stood up to both legal and psychiatric
scrutiny. I am still confounded by this killer’s chilling disregard for
people, which provided me with so many occasions of uneasiness and
discomfort during my examinations. A human was not human to him.
In dreams and in stories, he would continue to debate whether some¬
one was dead or alive. He really did not know the difference. Macek’s
necrophilia, in fact, was not sexual, but appeared to be denial, an ef¬
fort to resolve his confusion about the line between life and death. By
treating the body as if it were alive, he could try, as he said, “to bring
it back” by putting life into it. And even though Macek often protested
that he didn’t recall his victims, it was never true amnesia or blanking
out. It was an absolutely overwhelming erosion of whatever delicate
psychological balance he had—from memory to thought to feelings to
perception to the very muscles that controlled his portly physique.

As I went on to profile Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy, I heard less
frequently from Richard Macek. His lengthy handwritten letters had
slowed to a trickle of notes that eventually ceased altogether in 1980.
Because serial killers respond well when institutions hold rein over
them, it wasn’t surprising that the structure of incarceration was bene¬
ficial to Richard, who had become a model prisoner and was for the
most part well liked by those around him. He was serving a life sen¬
tence for two murders and two attempted murders. In the middle of
1987, however, I received word by phone that Richard Macek had
died. Only later when I called the prison for more information did I
hear that Macek committed suicide in his jail cell. While I wondered

48 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

what had precipitated the event, since Macek was comfortable in
prison, I didn’t really react to his death. I had truly learned a lot. The
patterns that Macek displayed, from his way of speaking to the way he
killed to his thought processes, would show up in other serial killers I
would encounter. Primarily, there was a pervasive hollowness to his
character, one that I would see constantly in other serial murderers,
one that regarded humans as worthless annoyances to be dealt with
and to be forgotten. Perhaps it is best expressed in his own words:

It was death. Beating on somebody, smacked right in face. Person
screamed, got hit, started to hit back. Got hit, got more infuriated.
Picked up the person, slammed them into the wall, beating until
death, lifeless or unconscious. Had no controllable power over me.
Until seen no response, until weren’t fighting back. Person seems to
change all the time. Small person, large person, huge and bulky-type
person. Heads all cut up from teeth or buckle hitting person.

He wasn’t talking about himself, but he could have been when he
said, “Person seems to change all the time.” That’s one of the primary
things I learned about serial killers from my time with Richard Macek.
They will be whatever you think they should be. So when they become
violent and kill, it seems to come out of nowhere. That’s what in¬
trigued me; that’s what made me want to learn much more. I hadn’t at¬
tached Macek to crimes other than the Kandel murder, but my original
goal was really in the area of science, not in the police work of nailing
a conviction. During my year with Macek, I had discovered scientific
methods that I would use over and over again in speaking to a serial
murderer. I had learned how to profile and interview a serial killer. I
now knew how to break down his defenses to get to the heart of the
matter. But where did the need to kill originate, exactly where deep in¬
side? That’s where I knew I had to go next. Deeper and deeper inside
is quite literally where my long journey would lead.

FOUR

ED C^EIN AND THE HISTORY
Of SERIAL KILLERS

I t was not what I expected for such a notorious man. After all, he
was the killer that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was based upon, and
our nation’s first true celebrity serial killer. But when I finally did meet
him, he sat hunched, old, and alone.

The room was like this. There was the harsh glare of the black-and-
white television. A few feet away, there was the chatter and occasional
jarring hoots of deranged laughter. Away from the haze of cigarette
smoke around some coffee-drinking card players, Ed Gein sat. No one
in the common room full of patients and nurses really knew about
him, about who he was and what he once did. He never gazed out the
mesh wire-covered windows either, at the blue-gray lake nearby or at
the people strolling along the path toward it or into the flourishing
greenhouse directly underneath his window. He merely sat.

He was a shadow of the man who the little children in Wisconsin
feared like some boogyman. “Don’t go across the street,” mothers
would warn. “Don’t go down to the river or play on the railroad tracks
or down in the basement. Ed Gein will get you.” And the children lis¬
tened, and later in life they too would warn their offspring. As flames
crackled around campsites, ghost stories were told about him. There

50 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

were dolls bearing his likeness. An amateur humorist crafted lyrics
about the mild-mannered serial killer (which are on the Internet to this
day), to be sung to the tune of the old 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hill¬
billies. He was no longer the crazed killer portrayed in badly written
true-crime books, no longer the sociopathic figure used as the basis for
Alfred Hitchcock’s interpretation of Robert Bloch’s tale Psycho. He was
certainly not larger than life. As a patient at the Mendota Mental
Health Institute, Ed Gein was just an old man all used up and getting
ready to die.

I was a staff psychiatrist at Mendota, where my duties included
everything from admitting disturbed patients to being called upon to
appear in court to testify about patients’ mental states. To me, Men¬
dota was an idyllic place with a soulful history, a place to work hard,
yes, but also a place in which I could meditate, forget about murder
and psychiatry, and just enjoy the beauty of the outdoors.

About a month after I began working at Mendota, I approached Ed
Gein and told him I would like to ask him some questions, adding that
I was a doctor and I wasn’t going to further sensationalize his already
sensationalized life. I bent over to look him in the eye and said, “I just
want to understand a little more about you.”

“All already been said.”

“Just a little talk, Ed?”

“Well, sit down then,” he said, gesturing to a nearby chair. Ed Gein
was suffering from dementia, and his short-term memory was im¬
paired and nearly nonexistent, but the dementia did not affect what he
recalled in the past. Gein very clearly remembered the details of what
had transpired long ago. Like Richard Macek, Gein lived calmly in the
controlled setting, and his attitude was good-natured and easygoing.
Like Macek, he seemed to be a genuinely kind man—when he wasn’t
killing.

“I heard that you did some things, Ed, some things that were not
so good.”

“I did some things. I did ’em,” he snapped with a “so what?” kind
of attitude. I had immediately touched a sore spot. It wasn’t that he
didn’t like being reminded of his past crimes. Like a sideshow freak,

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 51

Gein had been poked and prodded ever since his arrest in 1957. Dur¬
ing that week of November 17, when his acts banished the cold war
and the space race from the front pages of many midwestern newspa¬
pers, Gein himself was the most significant story. Wisconsin police had
been searching for a handful of missing people dating back to the late
1940s, and they suspected Gein as the murderer. While the number of
suspected killings wasn’t big, the manner in which Gein killed was
highly unusual. He was convicted of the murder of Bernice Worden,
whom he skinned, hung, and butchered, as if she were an animal
whose carcass was being readied for market. Since the moment of that
arrest, a parade of police, lawyers, and psychiatrists had repeatedly
asked him the same questions. Sleazy journalists and Hollywood pro¬
ducers had promised him money and possible freedom for his story,
and when he told them all he could, they never returned. At this point
in his life, he just wanted to be left alone.

But I plodded on, speaking to him over the course of a casual ten-
hour interview, spread over the period of two months. At that point, I
had not formulated many of my theories about serial killers. I was still
searching for more data and still putting together the general profile in
which most serial killers could fit. Though I really didn’t think that my
research on these murderers would add up to a life’s worth of data, I
found I had an intense curiosity for more study.

Even though he lived in a town that was generally full of reserved,
conservative people, young Ed Gein was the prototypical midwestern
nice guy whose backwoods shyness made him the butt of jokes long
before he stooped to murder. In the 1940s (and to some extent even
today), Plainfield, Wisconsin, in Waushara County really was a “plain”
town of several hundred residents. Gein inherited a sprawling 195-acre
farm that had fallen into disrepair after his father, brother, and mother
died. It has been widely but inaccurately reported that Gein began to
kill because his father was abusive to the son he thought was a sissy.
Augusta, his crabby, impatient mother, was a Bible-obsessed religious
zealot who created a willing religious captive in Gein, who was said to
have been unusually attached to his mother. When she died, as the in¬
exact theory goes, Gein was supposedly absorbed into a world of

52 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

mourning, which never really ended. He lived a life of constant sorrow,
it’s said, which partially centered on making his vast and broken-down
farmhouse a shrine to his deceased mom. But there was nothing I’d
found in my research that indicated his controlling mother had led
him to kill. Certainly, nothing that Gein said led me to believe that he
harbored any unusual love or hate for his mother.

At Mendota, I asked, “Ed, they said you never got over your
mother’s death. What do you think of that?”

“I cared about her. Cared about her a lot. But it wasn’t like I didn’t
get over it. Everyone cares when their mother dies.”

“But they said you sealed off a lot of your house and made it a
shrine to her, and that you kept your mother in that room after em¬
balming her.”

“Those were just experiments. And the house was big. I left her
room alone. But I closed off some of the house because it was just too
darn big to heat, too darn big for one person.”

But it was true that he killed, as if it were a craft at which he
would be an unparalleled master. Inside the house, sawed and
hacked and roughly hewn, was a bowl made from half of a woman’s
skull. Stretched taut, thin, and sewn tightly were lamp shades made
of female skin. There was an unwieldy belt decorated not with studs
or metal stars or knotted leather, but with a human head, nipples,
noses, and a heart. Hung on doors were human heads, which were
happened upon by boys for whom he babysat, souvenirs he said
were shrunken heads from the South Seas. When the startled boys
told their parents what they had seen, they simply weren’t believed.
Gein was eccentric, said the townspeople, but he would never do
anything bad.

Gein wasn’t just eccentric. He would literally prey on the dead. At
the Plainfield cemetery a mile or two from his home, he dug up the
grub-filled earth, prying open the coffins of the deceased, making off
with their body parts: limbs, heads, and breasts.

Under the Wisconsin moon, which was his only witness, Gein
would slip into a patchwork outfit made of skin and body parts, in¬
cluding breasts and a vagina, and he would dance. He would dance

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 53

and sing and two-step and croon, parading around to songs only he
could hear.

“Yeah, I did that” is all that he said to me.

I wished I had gotten more information directly from the mouth of
Ed Gein, but he was drained and disinterested. With more questions
than I had before I met Ed Gein and determined to discover more
about serial murderers throughout history, I took to spending many
long weekend days and evenings in the Madison university library,
poring over as much information about the phenomenon as I could
uncover.

I had thought that serial killers were a phenomenon of the last one
hundred years of our history. And then I found someone the New York
Times called “one of the most bizarre figures in European history.”
Gilles de Rais was a handsome, wealthy baron and war hero who
fought side by side with Joan of Arc in the 1400s. When Thomas
Mann wrote about him, de Rais was said to personify “the religious
greatness of the damned; genius as disease, disease as genius, the type
of the afflicted and possessed, where saint and criminal become one.”
But de Rais was no saint, by any definition of the word. From his three
magnificent castles, especially one outside the French village of
Machecoul, de Rais sent his servants to fetch unwitting peasant chil¬
dren. Lured, kidnapped, and sometimes boldly taken in broad daylight
to de Rais’s palace, innocent children were subject to horrors rarely
seen since the dawn of recorded history.

How wealthy was de Rais? The security provided by privilege in
fifteenth-century France was even more magnificent and coveted than
it is today due to the constant eruption of bubonic plague and the
bloody Hundred Years War, which pitted the French against the em¬
boldened, brutal English. It was a time of suspicion, of conjurers, of
belief in the dark power of demons, of the Catholic Church’s omnipo¬
tence, of hope in alchemy and geomancy, of overriding terror about
death and desperate attempts to overcome its clutches. It was into this
milieu that Gilles de Rais was born.

After victory with Joan of Arc at the Battle of Orleans, Gilles be¬
came a marshal of France, a hero. When he rode into town, he rode a

54 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

horse bedecked with jewels and ornaments at the head of a royal pa¬
rade of two hundred soldiers he employed. Children, the most beauti¬
ful preteens with angelic voices from his own music school, sang his
praises as they too rode on horseback. When he wasn’t strutting
around, he wrote plays in which he was the star center stage, backed
by lavish theatrical backgrounds, and he offered gifts and feasts to
those who came to take it all in. De Rais wasn’t grandiose, he just did
these things to meet certain cultural expectations. For de Rais, such pa¬
rades were part of the trappings of his life and times. Other French no¬
bles had huge entourages when they traveled from place to place. And
as we’ll see later, the infamous John Wayne Gacy did similar things
within his modern-day community. Fie arranged backyard barbecues
where hundreds of people communed, and he put together a big Pol¬
ish parade in the Chicago area where luminaries gathered.

George Bataille, the author of The Trial ofGilles de Rais, points out
that some of de Rais’s life was not unlike the lives of other feudal lords
of the time, “with whom he shares the pleasures of egoism, laziness and
disorder. Fie lives in the same way, in those heavy and luxurious
fortresses, among the men-at-arms in his service, and in contempt of
the rest of the world.” Fie existed in a “contradictory chaos of calcula¬
tion, violence, good humor, bloody disorder, mortal anguish.” So it
was also for his relations, mighty feudal lords with vast authority over
peasants and servants. De Rais’s parents died in 1415, leaving the
eleven-year-old Gilles in the care of his rich thug of a maternal grand¬
father, Jean de Craon. Instead of educating the child with books and
Fatin (as he had promised Gilles’s parents) and passing on to him a
grandfather’s wisdom and care, Jean left de Rais with only the most
minimal schooling or supervision. In doing so, says Bataille, he created
a wild young pit bull of a child, free to explore any path, criminal or
not, to which he was inclined.

I don’t believe it was de Rais’s upbringing that led him to kill, but
that’s how even the writers of the time rationalized his crimes. In fact,
de Rais spoke of his wayward childhood with a scribe who wrote, “On
account of the bad management he had received in his childhood,
when, unbridled, he applied himself to whatever pleased him, and

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 55

pleased himself with every illicit act. . . . He perpetrated many high
and enormous crimes . . . , since the beginning of his youth, against
God and His commandments.”

De Rais became a warrior under the tutelage of two men: Guil-
liaume de La Jumelliere, an Angevin lord and military adviser, and
Georges de La Tremoille, a politician so close to King Charles VII that
he was considered to be the prime minister. With Joan of Arc in the
Battle of Orleans, de Rais proved as unstoppable and almost as driven
as the future saint and returned home a war hero . . . and somehow
changed for the worse.

By 1432, de Rais was killing in earnest. De Rais sent his servants to
town to search out the prettiest children, mostly boys (although a few
girls were gathered up as well). His lackeys lied to parents, sometimes
saying the great, heroic baron was going to send their sons or daugh¬
ters away for a proper education or that they were being sent out of the
country to escape the ever-threatening English. To the starving, they
would simply offer a loaf of bread. If parents weren’t around, the ac¬
complices simply snatched up the children as they played in the street,
put them on the backs of their horses, cleaned them up, and brought
them to de Rais’s castle.

De Rais reveled in children’s panic as they were brought to him, led
down the long, clammy halls. Invariably he was drinking, but I don’t
believe it made him kill. Alcohol might have decreased the ability he
had to keep himself together, but it didn’t cause his crimes. When a
person is really drunk, he can’t do much of anything, so my guess was
that de Rais wasn’t completely out of it. What happens with many nor¬
mal people is that they lose inhibition when under the influence, but
this doesn’t occur with the serial murderer, and it can’t be seen as a trig¬
ger. Most serial killers don’t have any one thing I can point to that leads
them to kill. So it was with de Rais and drinking.

Alcohol or not, imagine the child’s fear as he was escorted into a
room where de Rais stood. Beside him were mechanical implements
used to raise the child by the neck and hang him with cords so that his
terrified cries would be muffled. Just before the child passed out from
choking, he would be lowered and freed. De Rais would hug him and

56 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

dote on him, comforting the boy by saying he was merely playing a
joke. As the child calmed down, de Rais would raise a braquemard, a
large horseman’s sword with a wide flat blade, pointed and sharp at
both edges. Carefully lowering the sword, he cut a vein on the neck of
the child. At that point, he began to masturbate as the blood spurted
wildly with every waning heartbeat. De Rais enjoyed slicing open the
belly of a child and masturbating until he climaxed into it. His valet,
Poitou, a boy he had raped but kept alive for what de Rais saw as his
unparalleled physical beauty, said the killing involved “sometimes be¬
heading or decapitating them, sometimes cutting their throats, some¬
times dismembering them, and sometimes breaking their necks with a
cudgel.”

De Rais’s was indicted on October 11, 1442, by the French Catholic
church for the murder of 140 children over the course of fourteen years.
Two weeks later on October 26, he was hanged before a large crowd and
then burned. Though the church’s indictment states that he began to
murder children in 1426, the first victim’s parents said the killings
started in 1432. De Rais himself affirmed that later date in his confes¬
sion. It is a crucial date, since it also coincides with the death of the
elder de Craon on November 15, 1432. De Rais began to kill once his
closest relative had passed on. It was similar to Ed Gein in that Gein
began killing after his mother died. And Richard Macek began his ram¬
page after his father died. As with de Rais and Macek, even when they
didn’t like their parents, something about a parent’s death was one of
the triggers that led them to murder. But were there other triggers? They
may never be known, since the trail of these killings has long grown
cold. Still, there were triggers. Something made de Rais dispatch his ser¬
vants to retrieve children for him. Bataille notes that it may have been
the site of barbarism during war that triggered de Rais’s fetish for blood.
But there’s no real proof of this, only Bataille’s conjecture. Certainly
thousands of others went forth in combat and later they never sought
to murder scores of children. There must have been something else that
plagued de Rais. He wasn’t simply a madman because he gravitated
toward a certain type of victim, children. A madman would just kill
anyone willy-nilly from all strata in society. Like other serial killers after

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 57

him, de Rais chose to kill the marginal in society, those that were easily
attainable. But as with Ed Gein and Richard Macek, what could that
something else have been? I knew it wasn’t simply madness and it wasn’t
sociopathy. But what was it? I didn’t yet know.

Not long after the terrible reign of Gilles de Rais, about eight hundred
miles to the east, came the vicious fifteenth-century rule of Vlad Tepes,
often nicknamed Vlad the Impaler. In most books, Vlad is considered
to be a serial killer or mass murderer bar none. Wherever you search
on the Web, you’ll find Vlad called by these names. But this is a myth
as unreal as the vampire tale, since Tepes was not a serial killer at all.
Nor was he actually a mass murderer. It’s important to say why this is
true because the crimes of Tepes are so often misrepresented. That’s not
to say he wasn’t a vicious murderer, but the labels are dead wrong.

Though he is widely considered to be the real-life template for
Bram Stoker’s gothic 1807 novel Dracula, Vlad himself was no fang¬
baring ghoul of the undead. He did not morph into a flying bat who
lived to prey on the necks and genitals of young women as they slept.
Nor did vengeful townspeople seek to end the fiend’s immortal exis¬
tence with a stake to the heart as he lay resting in his coffin.

However, sharpened stakes were to play an important role in the
real-life story of Vlad the Impaler, the proud, darkly attractive ruler of
the southern Romanian kingdom ofWallachia, south of Transylvania
on the Arges River. Vlad was born in 1431 to a nobleman called
Basarab. As a young boy, he was educated by monks and taught to
fight with chain mail and sword, imagining the branches of trees were
the limbs of Turkish sultans. Basarab ordered Vlad’s warrior training
early, as Basarab saw not only Turks but also Hungarians, Germans,
and Poles battling for control of the rugged Carpathian mountains.
And he wanted his children to be ready—even though they were
young. Romania had been fought over and divided for centuries—
since the Roman Empire laid claim to the pagan territory in A.D. 106.
By the time Vlad was born, the Turks ruled much of the edges of West¬
ern Europe, hoping to spread to the Far East and farther west.

A fifteenth-century royal weaned on the ways of warriors, Vlad was

58 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

one of the more passionate crusaders, a particularly sadistic Romanian
who saw violence as the path not only to religious freedom and power
but also to the religious superiority of a Roman Catholic world. In
many battles against the Muslim Ottoman, Vlad Dracula proved his
savvy . . . and his devious nature.

He sent his troops to kill with focus and purpose. Vlad the Im-
paler’s seemingly insatiable appetite for blood was not driven by some
mad, unknowable inner lust. It had much more to do with his need for
what today we call homeland security, the protection of Romania from
outside invaders. Vlad’s imperious crusade to achieve rule over Roma¬
nia was the work of a paranoid ruler full of religious fervor. If you were
near Vlad, you wouldn’t give him a sideways glance for fear of retribu¬
tion. If he didn’t like you, he’d kill you, in much the same way Saddam
Hussein’s servants and soldiers lived in fear of Hussein and his retribu¬
tion in Iraq. Again, this is not the work of a serial killer, who is trig¬
gered to kill, or a mass murderer, who kills out of anger against a
society he feels has oppressed him.

In many history books, it is assumed that Vlad went mad after
being taken prisoner by the Turks. Not only was he tortured in a dun¬
geon in Adrianpole, but from his window he saw daily executions—
beheadings, killings of prisoners by wild animals and impalements on
sharpened poles, often through the genitals. He vowed that should he
live through his imprisonment, he would do the same to the Turks.
That pledge became a life’s mission when he discovered that the Turks
had massacred his family, burying alive one of Vlad’s brothers. When
the Turkish sultan freed Vlad in the late 1440s, the seventeen-year-old
joined the Turkish Army, inwardly vowing revenge. After returning to
Hungary to become prince, he began to kill. During a six-year reign of
terror between 1556 and 1562, it’s said that he executed between
30,000 and 100,000 people. On one particular St. Bartholomew’s Day
in the Romanian town of Sibiu, Vlad is said to have impaled 20,000
citizens on sharp, oiled stakes that were inserted slowly so the peasants
would suffer more before they died. When Court TV’s crimelibrary.com
and other Web sites list Vlad as a serial killer, he doesn’t fit the bill. He

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 59

had major motives based in politics: to conquer, organize, and elimi¬
nate. Once these goals were met, he stopped his rampage.

A century later, a distant relative of Vlad Tepes began a series of
murders that even today is difficult to comprehend. Hungarian
Countess Elizabeth Bathory was a vain beauty not only obsessed with
her looks but also in constant search of a way to keep her body and face
young for as long as she lived. Bathory, who ruled over a small portion
of Hungary in the mid-1500s, utilized torture to discipline her ser¬
vants—everything from making a young, suspected thief grip a sizzling
coin until it burned and scarred her hand to taking an iron to the face
of a servant whose work on a dress produced wrinkles instead of
smooth cloth. Yet torture of peasants and servants was not uncommon
during the Middle Ages. In fact, not long before the rule of Bathory, a
peasant uprising was quashed by the Hungarian king. Their young
leader was kidnapped; hours later he was grilled alive on a fiery throne.
His followers were made to eat part of him. Then they themselves were
hanged. Certain members of the ruling class devoted so much time to
creative methods of torture that it was almost a kind of entertainment,
pastime, or sport. Unfortunately, the lower classes were generally
treated by royalty as though they were mere animals and severe force
had to be used to discipline them. What led Bathory to be remembered
by historians was the reason she killed over 650 virgin girls in the
course of thirty years of despotic rule. In order to preserve her youth,
which she believed was leaving her after giving birth to two children,
the forty-year-old woman felt the need to bathe in the fresh blood of
virgins. She was said to have taken a spike-filled cylindrical cage and
then inserted a victim inside. She had the cage lifted up by a servant,
then jabbed young girls with a burning poker. As they would jump
back, they’d impale themselves. Bathory then sat herself beneath the
cage, showering in the blood that spewed onto her.

The spurting blood of these teens (who were still alive as she bathed)
was believed by Bathory to be the fountain of youth. It was only when
the countess began to prey on females who were of minor nobility that
the judicial system became concerned. Countess Bathory had also be-

60 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

come slipshod in her disposal of the bodies, occasionally having the
corpses thrown out of her carriage onto the road when she was done
with them. And when she ran out of virgins in her own town, she sent
her henchmen far and wide to procure more—which became extraor¬
dinarily costly, even for a woman of Bathory’s immense means. Finally,
Bathory began calling on old loans that her deceased husband made to
the king, who was as wily as he was wrathful. Realizing that local law
held that prisoners had no right to monies a freeman had right to, he
called for Elizabeth’s immediate capture and arrest. She was ultimately
kept sealed in her castle chamber—for women of nobility were rarely
placed in prisons in the Middle Ages. For the rest of her life, Bathory
was kept safely away from the virgins she yearned for.

But Bathory was not a serial killer according to my definition. Like
Vlad, she may have been unduly suspicious. She may have punished
her servants severely. And she may have been ruthless in her quest for
blood in the bain. But she had a focus and a reason for each killing.
She wanted to remain beautiful. While the acts were far more atrocious
than those of our current upper classes, who stick themselves with nee¬
dles filled with poisonous Botox to remove their wrinkles or suck fat
from their thighs or tie up their intestines to eat less and reduce their
weight, the hoped-for effect of Bathory’s bloody lotion was the same. I
don’t believe her killings had anything to do with strange sexual pref¬
erences. Nor were they combined with a deep aggression. Fder horrible
actions were just something she believed she had to do to remain
pretty. Killing those virgins was the only way she felt she could make
her belief reality.

In Chicago near the turn of the twentieth century, a strange man built
something he called a castle. A pharmacy and other stores were on the
first floor, but above the first floor it was like one of those old fun-
houses, a chaotic maze of a place with seemingly no rhyme or reason.
The second floor, for instance, had thirty-five rooms when the build¬
ing opened for business in May 1890. As the public flocked to his
drugstore, above which was his castle full of Romanesque columns and
frescoes, the strange man grew wealthy.

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 61

H. H. Mudgett, a pharmacist who also called himself Dr. Holmes,
was like a mad scientist out of a B movie. He liked to inspect his place,
opening and closing fifty-one creaky doors on the second floor, firing
up a kiln with a cast-iron hatch, inspecting tubs of acid and quicklime,
testing chutes that led to the basement. To sealed rooms he added gas
jets, stairways that went up but ended at a wall, and trap doors. He also
built an instrument like a modern-day rack that was said to be able to
stretch a person to twice his height. Dr. Holmes, not a doctor at all,
was later thought to be insane. He created a pharmacy that was more
like a paeon to ugly architecture with its signs and gaudy paintings
than it was a dispensary of medicine. In his identity of Dr. Holmes,
Mudgett was an operator, a smooth conniver, a bigamist who thrived
on swindling and schemed to fraud insurance companies from
Chicago to Philadelphia.

Mudgett had a penchant for killing some of those with whom he
had relationships and collecting their money—either their life savings
or life insurance policies. In addition, during the high times of the
Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Dr. Holmes attacked and murdered
many wide-eyed fairgoers who used his castle as a kind of rooming
house. The stealthy, fast-talking Mudgett often employed an accom¬
plice to wash, clean, and articulate the bones, paid him about $30, then
smirkingly sold the skeleton to local colleges for well over $250. He was
indicted for murdering his most loyal assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, in late
summer 1895, and that fall was sentenced to death by hanging. In a
posttrial confession, he said he murdered twenty-seven people, though
some estimate he killed as many as two hundred. But what put Dr.
Holmes’s deeds into the serial killer category is the way he ruthlessly ex¬
perimented upon the persons whom he murdered. Dr. Holmes cut his
victims, skinned them, removed chunks of flesh, burnt them, prodded
them, and placed them in acid baths. He left one wife in a sealed cham¬
ber to hear her scream for days as she gradually died of starvation.

If Dr. Holmes was thought to be an eclectic mad scientist who ex¬
perimented and conspired to extort money to make his crimes com¬
plete, Captain Carl Panzram thrilled to kill. An accomplished sailor, he
traveled the world over between 1918 and 1926, killing everywhere

62 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

from Oregon to New York City to South Africa. He seemed to prefer
terrifying young boys, and he had a nasty racist streak to boot. In the
20,000-word life story/confession he gave to his only friend, a prison
guard, Panzram says he coaxed a twelve-year-old boy to his place of em¬
ployment, the deserted Sinclair Oil Company grounds. There he as¬
saulted and murdered him with a large rock which he bashed again and
again into his head. Wrote Panzram, “I left him there, but first I com¬
mitted sodomy on him and then I killed him. His brains were coming
out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader.”

“His brains were coming out of his ears.” It was this kind of brag¬
ging that Panzram used to describe his crimes more than once. The
sight of crushed brains seeping from the head not only proved his vic¬
tim had expired, but also pointed to his pride in the creation of death.
After all, it wasn’t that he killed by cutting the belly, which would be
sloppy. Nor was it stabbing and shooting through the heart, the organ
from which poets say romantic feelings emanate. Attacking the brain
made sure that the center of intellect and thought and all things
human, all things that we know and all things that we do not know,
would be destroyed.

Traveling to what was then called the Dark Continent, he hired a
group of natives from Lobito Bay to take him to hunt for crocodiles,
which he said he would sell to merchants from Europe who were based
in the Congo. When the men suggested that they were due a percent¬
age of the profits, Panzram shot them—repeatedly—then tossed them
overboard into the muddy river where the thick-snouted reptiles
swarmed. The evidence of the crimes would soon be digested in their
bellies. Then he quietly rowed the canoe back to Lobito Bay, without
his reptilian booty, hurrying to leave the small town before being
caught.

For Captain Panzram, killing was easy, and he often fancied him¬
self not only as a dauntless mercenary but also as the world’s greatest
hit man for hire. He daydreamed of blowing up bridges, of killing mas¬
sive numbers of people, of raping some and of robbing others. While
there was no remorse for what he did, Panzram admitted, “I preyed
upon the weak, the harmless, and the unsuspecting.” Some might say

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 63

this is an unusual degree of self-awareness for a serial killer. But they all
know they’re going after people who aren’t going to fight back. Some,
like Richard Macek, may not recall the actual details of a murder. But
they certainly know that their victims aren’t strong and tough.

Like other serial killers, Panzram spoke to law enforcement officials
of a spotty recollection. “I have killed a number of people in different
places and some of the facts escape my memory,” he confessed. Despite
his confession, he tried to defend himself in the courtroom, which must
have been quite a sight to see. Panzram failed at his efforts miserably,
threatening witnesses whose testimony he disliked by taking the index
finger of his right hand and dragging it across his throat, as if to slit it.
But when Panzram was eventually charged with murder, he admitted to
twenty-two homicides and said he wished he had killed twenty-two
more. Detectives asked him why he killed a child who was the picture
of innocence. The angry, overly tattooed captain lashed out, “I hate all
the fucking human race. I get a kick out of murdering people.”

In the Roaring Twenties came Albert Fish. The elderly, balding fa¬
ther of six with a thick gray mustache was based in New York City, and
in photos he somehow resembled the actor Wilford Brimley, but with
a fixed, cold glare. When I read his letters, I felt chilled. It’s one thing
to use clinical terms in a medical conversation about someone being a
cannibal. But the letter I read from Albert Fish to the parent of one of
his victims was particularly gruesome and manipulative. Early in his
letter, Fish talked of an acquaintance, Captain John Davis, who in a
trip to the Far East had sampled the cooked flesh of children after
spanking them “to make the meat tender.” Fish was intrigued. Imag¬
ining himself a kind of connoisseur, Fish wrote he “made up my mind
to taste it.”

Six years after killing ten-year-old Grade Budd and just ten days
after Walter Winchell talked about her on his widely listened to radio
program, Fish wrote about Davis to Delia Budd, Gracie’s mother.

On Sunday June the 3—1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St.

Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my

lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her.

64 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go.

I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out.
When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild-
flowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did
not I would get her blood on them.

When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I
hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked
she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and
she said she would tell her mamma.

First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I
choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my
meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little
ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.

I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

Fish was said to be an emotionless prisoner who, when interviewed
by detectives, explained that he had “a thirst for blood.” Outwardly, he
was meek and polite. Prior to his capture, he had already been arrested
for everything from sending obscene notes to grand larceny—but none
of the charges stuck. Fish, who claimed he was constantly whipped at
St. John’s Orphanage in Washington, D.C., also murdered young Billy
Gafney, explaining that

I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short han¬
dle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8
inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs.

1 cut off his ears—nose—slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out
his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my
mouth to his body and drank his blood.

I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones.
Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a
few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle
of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about

2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I
cut off the head—feet—arms—hands and the legs below the knee.

Ed Gein and the History of Serial Killers | 65

This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them
into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to
North Beach.

I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked
best. His monkey and pee wees [penis and testicles] and a nice little
fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears—
nose—pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, cel¬
ery, salt and pepper. It was good.

Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and
pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek
of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and
when the meat had roasted about 'A hour, I poured about a pint of
water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I
basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice
and juicy.

Much as detectives found him emotionless, psychiatrists who inter¬
viewed Albert Fish claimed he was detached, that he didn’t care
whether he lived or died. When examined by doctors, it was discovered
that Fish had been inserting needles between his scrotum and rectum.
X-rays, rushed to be developed, revealed twenty-nine needles in that
area. Serial killers don’t usually abuse themselves in this way. I knew
that what Albert Fish did wasn’t like someone who was a borderline
personality disorder and is always cutting himself to let out the pain or
to remember that he can still feel something. It may be that Fish
needed to know what the pain he administered felt like. What I do
know is what we’ll see over and over again in this book: serial killers
like to experiment simply for the sake of experimentation. That’s what
Albert Fish did, and it had no greater psychological meaning.

At the trial for the murder of Grade Budd, it became clear that
Fish’s children were privy to the old man’s odd nature, as they said they
saw him drive nails into a board and then flagellate himself with it. The
masochist even asked his children to hit him, and they occasionally
agreed. Even when Fish sat strapped in the electric chair and was about
to die, he told the guards that he couldn’t wait for the thrill of elec-

66 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

tricity to surge through his body. Electrocution, he said blandly, was
one of the few thrills he’d never experienced. And then, his life was
over.

After reviewing these historical cases, I thought about the similari¬
ties these serial killers may have shared. The first thing I noticed is that
they weren’t considered by their peers to be odd, different, or danger¬
ous. Their crimes were done carefully, and they were able to remain
undetected for long periods of time. There was one fallacy I noted after
researching de Rais’s trial. Serial killing was not a phenomenon only of
the United States, one that, critics said, occurred because the societal
values in America had declined. It was a worldwide phenomenon. And
if serial murders happened as far back as de Rais, they have probably
been going on since the dawn of the very first communities in the time
of the caveman. I also realized that with Gein, it wasn’t necessary to be
highly mobile to be a serial killer. You didn’t need access to highways
and thruways and the interstate system to get away and cover your
trail. All you needed to do was to blend in.

But I still needed to find out more. I needed to talk to serial killers
more, understand them more fully, if that was at all possible. I had
begun with a null hypothesis that held “there’s no difference among
murderers.” But as I collected the data from history, I began to see that
there was a distinction between the average murderer and the serial
murderer: there was no great rage or any jealousy or any deep emotion
at all that prompted serial killers to murder again and again.

I was obsessed with gathering more and more information, reams
of it, in the hopes that I would someday yell “Eureka!” and find an an¬
swer to the question, Why do these killers kill? I thought, This is going
to be a long, long process, one that will take years, one that could
nearly exhaust me because it means profiling dozens and dozens of se¬
rial murderers. But I’m hooked; I’m really hooked.

FIVE

JOHN WAYNE CjACY

T he phone kept ringing, and even though I was far too busy, I
answered it. “Dr. Morrison, this is Sam Amirante. I’m the at¬
torney for John Wayne Gacy.”

The media was already in the process of making John Wayne Gacy
the world’s most notorious serial killer, but I wasn’t in serial killer mode
at all. In fact, I was deeply involved in the plans for my wedding. Sam
Amirante had seen the paper that morning; an article about me and
my work called “Tracking Down Our Mr. Hydes” had appeared in the
Chicago Tribune. Within the story, I was quoted as saying that most se¬
rial killers are never caught. I said that serial killers shouldn’t be “writ¬
ten off as psychopaths or sociopaths,” that the reason they kill is much
more complex. “It’s not someone whom we would call crazy, not some¬
one who’s actively hearing voices. It’s not that clear-cut. Someone like
that could murder, but they’re not as organized as people who do it
across time. Multiple murderers have a much deeper inner disorga¬
nization that is not really seen until they’re in the middle of a crime or
just as the crime is beginning. At that point, they’re like Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. They fall apart and then they come back together again.”

The article itself pointed out that serial killing had become more
rampant throughout the United States, and the FBI estimated that at
least thirty-five killers were on the loose.

68 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

On that chilly mid-November morning when all I wanted to
think about was the brilliant neurosurgeon I was about to wed, the
very animated Sam Amirante said he was so intrigued by the story,
he had tried to read the article while in the shower. He had his work
cut out for him as the defense lawyer for Gacy, the thirty-seven-year-
old contractor who was alleged to have murdered thirty-three young
men and teen boys in and around Des Plaines, a suburb about sev¬
enteen miles from the center of Chicago. It was hard even for the po¬
lice to believe he was guilty: Gacy was involved in local politics and
even had barbecues in his yard for the community, and that included
members of the police force. But the phone call wasn’t about specifics
of the crimes. Amirante was using his considerable charm with me
for a reason.

“How did you know?” asked Amirante.

“What do you mean?”

“You described John Gacy’s personality perfectly. Are you sure
you’ve never met him?”

“Of course not.” Sam and his staff didn’t know that anyone had
ever studied serial killers over a lengthy period of time, and he was
thrilled to hear that I had.

“Dr. Morrison, I’d like you to be a witness for the defense on the
Gacy case,” said Amirante. “We’re going to go for an insanity plea.”

“Hold on, Sam. That all depends on what I find after I examine
him.” I couldn’t simply sign on to be part of any old team, defense or
prosecution. Too many people were already “doctors for hire” by
lawyers, professionals who would agree to say what they were told to
say for the money and the media exposure. That wasn’t at all what I
wanted, since it had nothing to do with science or the oath I had taken
when I became a doctor.

Amirante was persistent, just as he would be persistent in front of
Judge Louis B. Garippo during Gacy’s trial. “Can you examine him
this week? I can arrange it right now.”

The young lawyer had seen Gacy go from acting casually and ad¬
mitting nothing about the murders to acting frantic and panicky and
admitting everything after Chicago police dug up the earth under the

John Wayne Gacy | 69

thirty-inch crawl space under his house north of Chicago. There they
uncovered dozens of bodies.

And what a gruesome discovery it was. Almost overcome by a sickly
sweet smell, Cook County evidence technician Daniel Genty went at
the stinking mud with a shovel. After just a few shovelfuls, he hit bone,
human bone. Meanwhile, Officer Michael Albrecht found a dark pur¬
ple puddle, dug a bit, and encountered loose, rotting flesh. What he
thought to be a leg covered by blue jeans was actually blackened, de¬
caying human matter. Soon the police found dozens of severely de¬
composed bodies. Then the crowds came. Curiosity seekers constantly
milled about the site, even though it was cold, even through Chicago
snowstorms, as though the site were a tourist attraction.

Ten-year-old Kelly Pucca was one of Gacy’s neighbors. What he told
the Chicago Tribune was representative of the fear that gripped children
and adults alike who continued to live on Summerdale Avenue. Kelly
admitted, “I get scared. I’m afraid in the shower that someone will get
me and I’m afraid spirits are going to come into our house.”

The fear and the tourist draw, combined with the fact that Decem¬
ber was a slow time for news, all congealed into one epic national hor¬
ror story. John Wayne Gacy was on his way toward becoming America’s
most notorious serial killer.

While I was extremely interested in talking to Gacy at length, I told
Amirante that I couldn’t do anything that week but briefly meet Gacy
until I returned from a short three-day honeymoon to Key Biscayne. I
certainly didn’t tell Amirante, but I was deeply in love. I didn’t feel I’d
ever find the right person . . . until I met my husband practically right
under my nose. I found him in the parking garage of a nearby apart¬
ment building during Christmastime 1978. He is a well-respected
brain surgeon and the son of generations of Chicago doctors, and his
family was very Northern European proper; I wore white gloves when
I first met his grandmother.

My husband was always thoughtful about romance, and I remem¬
ber that it rained horribly during a trip we took to Manhattan. The
winds pushed the rain sideways, but he had hired a horse-drawn car¬
riage to take us around Central Park. After the summer rain stopped,

70 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

and as the smell of greenery and flowers from the park wafted, he pro¬
posed to me. I know it sounds a little corny, but the romance of it all
was just perfect. So I didn’t want to think about lawyers, serial killers,
or law enforcement until well after the wedding.

During that New Year’s trip, I didn’t once think of my work. It was,
however, the only time that I was ever able to totally separate my work
and my personal life. In the future, on every trip to every country from
Brazil to Bali, I was compelled to spend part of my time on serial killers
and mass murderers.

Upon returning from my brief honeymoon, I was refreshed and
ready to talk to Gacy. They kept John Gacy in Cermak Hospital in the
southwest part of Chicago. The concrete structure housed thousands
of patients, but Gacy was in an area called 3 North, kept away from
much of the prison population, who would have killed him in a
minute given the chance. Child molesters were, and still are, consid¬
ered the lowest of the low within the prison pecking order. And be¬
cause of the constant media attention Gacy received, there were
probably some guards who wanted to get Gacy as well. So Cermak was
one tough, ugly place, a no-holds-barred asylum where inmates some¬
times tried to commit suicide. Those unfortunates were called
“swingers” because they had tried to hang themselves. In this facility I
would spend hundreds of hours with Gacy.

The door slammed shut and was locked from the outside. I can still
hear the singular sound of that lock echo in my mind. One sound, one
moment, and there I was with Gacy in his room, no one but him and
me—except for the guard posted outside the door. The bland yellow
room held a bed and a tray table, a small table near the door, and a pri¬
vate bathroom. Gacy was writing in an oversize red ledger book when
I came in, and he placed it on top of a stack of other such ledgers, di¬
aries of his days of incarceration and an attempt at writing his own life
story. Gacy loved to do jigsaw puzzles, and there were five completed
puzzles glued onto the walls. He directed me to sit at the small table,
an area without direct access to the door. It was a very subtle move, but
an unmistakable power play.

John Wayne Gacy | 71

On the surface, Gacy was a pleasant man of five feet eight inches,
and he wore a white T-shirt with khaki pants and sneakers. Stocky yet
fastidious, Gacy kept his living space neat and clean, with everything
in its place. Gacy was portly, with an oval face and a double chin. It
was almost as if he had no muscles there to give him expression when
he talked. And talk he did, about watching TV or playing dominoes
with the other inmates or about NFL football.

Still, immediately I felt threatened by him. I could see that Gacy
felt he was better than anything or anyone around him. He was con¬
descending about everything I said or asked, while at the same time he
was trying to be ingratiating.

The phrase “dumb and stupid” was used often by Gacy, a term that
was constantly used by John’s father to demean his son. Always, I had
the sense that he was thinking, Oh, you dumb, stupid person. Or,
Why did you ask something so stupid? While he wouldn’t dare say it
to me, he constantly seemed contemptuous and smug. Gacy displayed
a trait called grandiosity, something far beyond the arrogance found in
some successful people, because a terrible aggression lies beneath every¬
thing he says or does. I could just feel that Gacy felt he was too good
to explain his actions, that he was above explaining himself, not just to
me, but also to anyone. Yet it was his seeming thoughtfulness that rel¬
atives, friends, acquaintances, and victims first saw and chose to be¬
lieve. He was able to con most everyone. But to use the word con isn’t
really strong enough to convey the hold Gacy had over people. Com¬
pared to Gacy, con artists were babes in the woods. Often in magazine
articles and books, Gacy is labeled a psychopath. But Gacy’s pathology
went far beyond that of the stereotypical psychopath skulking around
the world without a conscience. First, the serial murderer is never as or¬
ganized as a psychopath in his methodology. A psychopath can plot
and carry out complex schemes. Secondly, psychopaths have a struc¬
tured personality that doctors can pinpoint, utilize, and work with.
That structured personality is like most everyone else’s, with an ego, an
id, and a superego. The psychopath has problems with the superego,
where guilt and conscience reside; he has no conscience, and he’s not
scattered the way a serial killer is. With intervention, the psychopath’s

72 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

personality can be modified and contained by a psychiatrist, whereas
the serial killers is all bits and pieces. Since his self is scattered, all his
day-to-day social activity is modeled on the way he has seen people act.
In medical terms, Gacy was far worse than a psychopath, for he can¬
not be cured.

Gacy had already confessed to murdering teen boys and men, but
he then changed his mind, recanting his confession. And even though
our initial conversation didn’t dwell on the details of any of his crimes
at all, Gacy made it clear that he was innocent of the murders of which
he was accused. To put it simply, Gacy felt he had been framed. Since
I was just there to listen on that first occasion, I didn’t push and ask
how he had been set up.

“I didn’t do any of those things they say I did,” Gacy complained.
Then he flashed a smile. It was not the kind of smile that made me feel
closer to the man who offered it. It didn’t make me feel that Gacy was
being open and candid either. It was the kind of smile that was both
leering and arrogant, and it stayed with me as though the smile could,
at any moment, grow feral, almost as if he could sprout fangs. It in¬
spired fear and made me want to keep my distance. I would remember
it when I was alone at night and my husband was away. It was my job,
however, to try to get inside Gacy. And I began to make my way in¬
side, even on that first day, simply by listening and egging him on.

“I don’t know if I actually killed anybody,” said Gacy.

I’d heard this kind of thing before, and it’s a very standard defense
for the common criminal up against the legal system. The murderer
could be lying or he could have the same memory problems Richard
Macek had. But I did believe it was manipulative for John to bring his
killings up so early in our meetings. I don’t think twenty minutes had
passed before he began his rants. Gacy said he was taking massive
amounts of Valium at the time of the killings—“between thirty mil¬
ligrams and fifty milligrams a day.” He admitted he got the Valium il¬
legally from pharmacists by having his successful construction
company do work on their drugstores. Then, from a file folder, he
brought out articles supporting the idea that Valium and poor mem¬
ory are related.

John Wayne Gacy | 73

He said, “I sleep four to five hours a night, and I think about it a
lot. It bothers me. And it’s a hell of thing to be charged with, thirty-
three murders, and not know what the hell really transpired. [Espe¬
cially] For a guy who is as organized as I am about things.”

Organized? That was really an understatement. I looked around the
place. “I’ve got to say this is one of the nicest places I’ve ever been to
talk to anybody.” It was obsessively clean. Gacy was able to organize
small things in his environment, but he wasn’t able to organize the big
things, like what went on inside his head.

Gacy was pleased that I noticed, and he preened a bit. “What,
roomwise? You’ll find that cockroaches still crawl around here, but I
can’t stand that. So I wash the floor. I scrub the floor on my hands and
knees. I wipe the floor. I washed all the walls; they just don’t come
clean.”

“Uh-huh. Too many years. How long have you been here as of
today?”

“Eleven months of being here and being secluded like this. I have
not had no nightmares. I have no remorse. I don’t feel sorry for any¬
body. I’m here and I don’t understand it.”

Changing the subject to his family, I asked Gacy about his rela¬
tionship with his father. I knew he was an abusive man, a man who was
never satisfied with his son, and he had died while Gacy was in prison
in Iowa for sodomy.

“They waited four days to tell you that he had ...”

“Died. Of course, you know, I took it hard. Cause, you know, all
along, throughout my life, I’ve let my dad down. So here, once again,
I did it again to him. My dad always thought I was dumb and stupid.
That I would never amount to anything. Just dumb and stupid.”

It was as if Gacy knew the kinds of things that would interest a psy¬
chiatrist, as if he were trying to do my own work for me. But it came
too quickly, I thought. I left Gacy after three hours of casual, intro¬
ductory conversation and returned to my office at the Evaluation Cen¬
ter, a psychiatric and neurologic diagnostic and intervention facility.
Starting the Evaluation Center from scratch wasn’t just a milestone for
me; it was a dream come true. I had always wanted to bring a multi-

74 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

disciplinary group of professionals together to provide the best possi¬
ble consultations. With as many as fifty consultants available for a case,
we are able to utilize the best of academic medicine, clinical practice,
and research. The goal is to have everyone do a top-notch job without
the constraints of a quota or of having to deal with intradepartmental
hospital politics. I had opened the center in 1980 to assess brain func¬
tions from a medical and psychiatric perspective. For instance, if some¬
one is having memory loss, I always assess the person for blood-flow
problems to the brain. If there is a positive finding, we have the person
looked at by a neurosurgeon who is capable of doing bypass surgery in
the brain. If the person is psychotic, we will continue with the evalua¬
tion, often done by me. We can provide a very comprehensive diagno¬
sis using these two perspectives, and it’s one I use with serial killers as
well.

As I reviewed my notes, it just staggered me that Gacy was so like
Richard Macek. Physically, they looked alike, thick-bodied, with
slumped postures and puffy faces like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. To top
it off, Gacy’s manner—his ingratiating words and the anger I saw boil
beneath—was just like Macek’s. I was beginning to think these men
were somehow cut from the same cloth. And I wondered if they had
some kind of genetic mutation that made them appear human. But in¬
side they were not like us. They do not have the same feelings you or
I possess. It is as if someone took a cookie cutter from a kitchen drawer
labeled “serial murderer.” The baker stamps out the dough and puts
them in the oven to bake. When they’re done, they come out . . . ready
to kill.

While the flagrant crimes of John Gacy may have appeared sexual
in nature, they were really about anger and aggression. Gacy was de¬
scribed as a sickly boy who had various spells of fainting throughout
his early years. When he was fifteen, Gacy had a huge fight with his fa¬
ther about use of the family car. Later that night while he was playing
cards with friends, Gacy’s eyes rolled back in his head, he listed for a
moment, and then passed out. After three weeks in the hospital, where
the doctors found nothing consequential, he passed out again when he
returned. When he came to, he flailed about frighteningly in his own

John Wayne Gacy

75

bedroom, where a doctor diagnosed him as having an epileptic fit.
John Sr. despised his son for what he saw as the boy’s hypersensitive,
girlish, sickly ways and continued to label him “dumb and stupid.” He
occasionally beat him, as he even did his wife, who was once punched
in the face and left bleeding. By the age of twenty, Gacy left his father
and family life and migrated to Las Vegas, where he worked as an at¬
tendant at the Palm Mortuary. Gacy later admitted to getting into a
coffin, holding a stiff, lifeless body close, and arousing himself by
pulling it on top of himself. It’s important not to read too much into
this act, because Gacy was not a necrophiliac who commonly had sex
with dead bodies. What he did was a combination of experimentation
with a body and something he saw as comfortable. He wanted to lie
down, and the coffin seemed to be the handiest thing available. The
definition of necrophilia is basically receiving pleasure from sex with a
dead person. It’s not a completely uncommon act with serial killers,
but it’s certainly not a constant. What Gacy did with the body had
nothing to do with the power and control that is said to fuel the need
for necrophilia. And unlike necrophiles, who avoid relating to living
people, Gacy had a full social life. For Gacy, what he did in the coffin
was more about answering the question, What is this like? Like Albert
Fish with his pins or like Kansas City’s Robert Berdella, whom we’ll
deal with soon, Gacy was simply experimenting, trying to see what
would happen if he did something.

When Gacy was twenty-six, near Christmas 1967, he began to lure
boys to his suburban home. Long before he began to kill them, he
would concoct elaborate plans to get sex from them. For instance, he
invited fifteen-year-old Donald Voorhees to his home to watch stag
films, saying that the movies were useful education for sex. He lied well
and vigorously, telling Voorhees that the Kinsey Report (the landmark
human sexual behavior study of white middle Americans under the age
of thirty-five first published in 1948) said that many young people his
age start their sexual experiences via oral sex with a man. When
Voorhees said that semen might taste bad, Gacy claimed it had no
taste, that oral sex wasn’t dirty, that it was just like sucking on your
thumb. Since Gacy was the chaplain of the local Jaycees at the time, he

76 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

also made it clear that the act between the two of them wouldn’t be im¬
moral. He even gave Voorhees money to help the boy buy an amplifier
for his rock band—and then coaxed him into having sex.

He eventually would coerce a teenage boy to pummel young
Voorhees brutally in an effort to stop Voorhees from testifying
against him in court. But the law caught up with Gacy, and he
was jailed. While Gacy was awaiting trial on the Voorhees charges,
which included malicious threats to extort and sodomy, police found
that Gacy had had sex with other underage boys. One of these teens
was Edward Lynch, a cook at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restau¬
rant that Gacy managed for his wife Marlynn’s father. In addition to
being raped, Lynch was chained and choked to the point of uncon¬
sciousness until he lost control and urinated in his pants. Gacy
would shackle other boys with their hands behind their back before
he raped them. While Gacy claimed that the sex was always consen¬
sual, Judge Peter Van Metre of the Tenth Judicial District Court sen¬
tenced the twenty-six-year-old Gacy to ten years in the Iowa State
Reformatory for Men in Anamosa for sodomy, which included tying
Voorhees up and raping him. The jail sentence was the beginning of
the end for Gacy’s marriage to Marlynn and for any contact with his
young son and daughter.

In Anamosa as in Cermak hospital, Gacy was an ideal prisoner, fas¬
tidious, orderly, often reading the Wall Street Journal in the library. Al¬
ways scheming, he rose up the prison ladder to become one of the
prison’s top chefs, where he awarded gourmet meals to prisoners in re¬
turn for favors like cigars or to guards in return for extra time on the
telephone. He even started a prison chapter of the Jaycees and per¬
suaded an elderly couple to donate their miniature golf course to the
prisoners. He was convincing, charming, and ingratiating, a politician,
really. Nonetheless, the prison wouldn’t permit Gacy to visit his father,
who died during Christmas 1969. Within seventeen months, John
Gacy was released from prison because of his exemplary behavior. Psy¬
chiatrist Richard Lee’s report to the parole committee read “The like¬
lihood of his again being charged and convicted of antisocial conduct
appears to be small.” Unfortunately, Dr. Lee couldn’t have been more

John Wayne Gacy | 77

wrong. Gacy became morose because he hadn’t been given leave to go
to his dying father, and that pall remained with him when he left the
jail. When he visited his fathers grave on Christmas 1971, John broke
down and couldn’t stop crying.

After my initial meeting with Gacy, I asked one of his surviving vic¬
tims, Jeff Rignall, to visit me in my office at the Evaluation Center.
Rignall was a man of medium height, thin but not skinny, with a mus¬
tache, long sideburns, and brown hair. He had been one of Gacy’s
more vocal victims, one who survived Gacy’s cruelty, and he felt he was
scarred for life.

In late March 1978, Rignall, a gay man who also dated women, ar¬
gued with his girlfriend, left her apartment in the New Town area of
Chicago, and decided to go to a bar. While Rignall was strolling down
the sidewalk, a fancy black car pulled up next to him. Slowly, Gacy
rolled down the window and affably struck up a conversation. Within
seconds, Rignall judged Gacy to be a nice guy, probably a closeted gay
man with a wife in the suburbs. He even felt somewhat sorry for him.
When Gacy offered some marijuana, Rignall got in the car, and they
began driving.

It didn’t take long for Gacy to pounce. Just as Rignall inhaled for
the second, possibly the third, time, Gacy slapped a reeking wet cloth
over his face, and the chloroform went to work. Rignall tasted its
sweetness, which doctors know to be forty times sweeter than sugar.
And there was the intense burn on his face, a feeling of unbearable
pain, before he passed out. When he awoke, he was in Gacy’s house on
a couch near a bar over which hung a painting of a clown. It seemed
to leer at Rignall, mocking him, laughing at him. Gacy restrained Jeff
in a kind of pillory he had fashioned. Then he forced Rignall to give
him oral sex. While Jeff’s face felt afire and swollen from the chloro¬
form, Gacy shoved various dildos, even a sharp fireplace poker, into
him. After beginning to bleed from the rectum, Jeff Rignall was in very
bad shape. When he was done with Jeff, Gacy dumped him in
Chicago’s Lincoln Park, in an area full of weeds, litter, and scurrying
rats. When he woke, he was able to make his way back to his girl¬
friend’s apartment. There, his injuries got worse. Rignall spent weeks

78 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

recovering in a hospital. He sustained permanent liver damage from
the chloroform, which is also known to trigger heart attacks.

I thought meeting with Rignall would help me gain more insight
into Gacy. Gently, I began to ask questions.

“Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Rignall became emotional as he recounted the story. “I didn’t think
I’d get out alive. I continued to bleed from the rectum in the hospital.
And the police didn’t believe me.” It wasn’t easy for Rignall to set aside
what had happened. When he had bad memories of the experience, he
said he’d get in a car, “drive a hundred and fifty miles and just cry.”

“How do you feel about John Gacy now?”

“In a way, I’d really like to see him burn. See, I thought I knew hor¬
ror. But I never realized that that kind of horror ever existed. And that
has a tendency to come back sometimes.”

“How so?”

“I’ve aged a lot in the last two years. I used to look a lot younger
than I do now.”

I felt that no matter what he said at the time, Jeff would gradually
recover some semblance of a routine in his life. He may have thought
he aged, but he was still only twenty-eight. Before him, he likely had a
long and promising life.

“Why do you think you survived?” I asked.

“Any time that he did anything to me or when he started to do
something to me, I never resisted because I was totally restrained and
there’s nothing I could do about it. He would wait until he would see
the pain on my face and then he would put the chloroform rag over
my face and I would be out. And I’d wake back up, and I’d be in a dif¬
ferent position, then he would tell me what he was going to do and say,
‘I just want to hear you say’. . . just real, I mean real vulgar things. And
at no time did I resist. That’s why I really kind of think I’m alive, be¬
cause I think that kind of turned him off.” That may well have been
the case. Rignall may have played a role of submission that allowed
him to live. That’s not to say that submission would’ve worked for any
victim of a serial crime or any of Gacy’s other victims. But at that mo¬
ment in time, perhaps because Gacy was tired, perhaps because Rignall

John Wayne Gacy | 79

didn’t fight back, Rignall survived. I didn’t gain a huge amount of in¬
sight into Gacy by interviewing Jeff, but it was important for me to
speak to one of these young victims, if only to get a handle on the body
type Gacy gravitated toward: thinnish light-haired or brown-haired
young men. It was just one more piece of the Gacy puzzle.

It was not the angry, occasionally hysterical Rignall but Robert
Piest who proved to be Gacy’s downfall. Sadly, before Piest, the au¬
thorities didn’t seem to care that much about the men and boys Gacy
was alleged to have killed, and they wouldn’t arrest him. Rignall told
me that when he suggested that police go to Gacy’s house, they
hemmed and hawed, saying it was too out of the way. Those unfortu¬
nates like Rignall were the marginal in society—the poor, the run¬
aways, the prostitutes, the depressed, the immigrant workers—people
authorities must have believed were not high on their priority list. The
authorities seemed to neglect and even eschew the tenet that no per¬
son should be considered disposable.

But Robert Piest, just fifteen years old when he was murdered, was
different. Consistently, he made the honor roll at Maine West High
School, where he was a gymnast and an avid amateur photographer.
The slim but athletic Robert was considered handsome and wore his
brown hair in a shag cut that was popular at the time. He was just
about to become an Eagle Scout when he encountered John Gacy at
the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois. Piest was a hard worker
at the drugstore. But on the night of December 11, 1978, he wanted
a job that paid him more money—perhaps because it was near Christ¬
mas, perhaps because he wanted to buy a Jeep, perhaps because it was
his mother’s birthday. Maybe Robert wanted to show her he could do
even better than he was doing. Whatever the case, Gacy, who by now
ran his own contracting business, was in the store to give the owner
some advice on upgrading the place. While stacking the shelves with
merchandise, Piest overheard Gacy mention what he was paying his
employees, which was twice what Piest was making at the drugstore.
Robert said nothing to Gacy, who eyed him occasionally while speak¬
ing to the drugstore’s owner. Gacy left the pharmacy, then returned to
pick up his forgotten appointment book.

80 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Outside, snow had begun to fall, and the Chicago weather was icy
cold. Piest asked a colleague if he could leave just a few minutes early
to speak to Gacy about getting some extra work. Donning his blue
parka, Robert went over to his mother, who was waiting to pick him
up in her car.

Excitedly, he said, “I just want to talk to this guy for a minute or
so. He might have work for me.”

Proud of her son’s work ethic, Elizabeth Piest agreed, then left her
car to pass the time by browsing the aisles of the pharmacy.

Robert ambled over to Gacy’s truck. He looked in to see Gacy
rustling some papers. For a moment, he hesitated. Then he rapped on
the window.

“Sir, are there any jobs available with you? Because I heard you talk¬
ing in the store.”

Piest flashed a smile at Gacy, who asked the boy to get inside the
truck. With the snow and wind whipping around, Robert obliged.

“Can you tell me more about the jobs you have?” asked Robert
once again.

According to Gacy, Piest was too aggressive about asking for a job.
He suggested that if Robert really wanted money, he might think
about selling his body for sex. Maybe Robert thought Gacy was jok¬
ing. Maybe he was stunned by the suggestion. Whatever his true feel¬
ings were, Robert didn’t say. He remained silent, and Gacy began
driving toward his house on Summerdale in the Norwood township
near Des Plaines. Once there, he wasted no time. Roughly, he hand¬
cuffed Piest. Robert begged him not to do anything more.

By morning, Piest was dead, raped then killed by Gacy’s choking
rope, and stuck like a rag doll between Gacy’s bed and the bedroom
wall. He slept with the body for a while, then Gacy placed Piest in the
attic and went to work. Later, he drove forty-five miles to Interstate 55
and threw the body into the Des Plaines River. After months passed,
Robert’s decomposed remains were found near the Morris Dresden
Dam in Grundy County, dozens of miles away. Gacy was charged with
murder, aggravated kidnapping, deviant sexual assault, and taking in¬
decent liberties with a child.

John Wayne Gacy

81

In my office, I looked at the photographs of all of the murdered
kids, pictures that obviously were taken in high school. They all looked
alike in a way. Yes, they were slim, attractive, and generally light haired,
the kind of person Gacy always stalked. But more, under the mops of
their longish hair they bore a look of hope and trust on their faces.
None mugged for the camera. None made faces or appeared too shy to
offer up anything but a face full of light. (Only one, nineteen-year-old
Matthew Bowman, seemed somewhat suspicious of the camera.) As a
psychiatrist I needed to remain objective, but sometimes emotions did
creep through, despite all my training. These young people deserved to
be alive . . . and free. I kept thinking, What a damnable waste of human
potential, of precious life. But a key tenet of being a research investiga¬
tor is to follow a protocol and to deal with the emotional impact later.

His family, of course, found it impossible to believe that John had
done anything wrong. I asked Gacy’s youngest sister, Karen, to come
to the office so that we could talk about her brother. Karen was a small,
nondescript, quiet woman with dark, shoulder-length hair that was
done neatly. For hours, she spoke about Gacy in glowing terms, about
his giving nature, about how he went out of his way to help people in
the community, about how he was protective of the family, especially
his mother, after his father, John Stanley Gacy, died. Like many family
members of serial killers, she was suffering from a deep kind of denial.

“I can’t believe this could have happened. He was always such a
good brother. How could this have happened?”

“Were all trying to find out.”

“Well, can’t people find out without it being in the papers and on
TV every day? It’s like we’re to blame, his family.”

The media was indeed making the Gacy case a spectacle, and she
was angry about what the family was being put through. Misinforma¬
tion flew about like sand flies in summer, and in a battle to get the
story first, some reporters wrote and broadcast rumors as facts without
checking them. Because I had heard it before from Richard Macek’s
family (among others), I understood what Karen was going through
and said as much. As the minutes passed, Karen began to open up.

82 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“We were always together, even though there was some sibling ri¬
valry. What I did notice was he got hit in the head with a swing lots of
times, had lots of blackout spells; he had some at school.” I understood
what Karen was doing. A person who’s had something bad happen
within their family constantly searches for a reason. No one wants to
think it’s just the family member’s fault. It’s just natural to want to
blame it on something. But in all the diagnostic work that had been
done throughout Gacy’s life, there was absolutely no indication that
there had been any physiological damage that could have led to the fu¬
ture killings. Even the mildest head trauma would usually result in er¬
rors in schoolwork or perhaps as vision problems, and that was simply
not seen.

“Did he have any other kinds of spells?”

“I remember that once he passed out at the top of the stairs and
didn’t remember who he was when he came to. He was like someone
who was drunk, but he wasn’t drunk. Something in his voice was dif¬
ferent. It was not his voice.”

Karen also recounted another alarming instance in which John
keeled over. Taken to the hospital, John railed against being restrained.
He had a “fit,” tearing at and destroying the straps “like he had the
strength of ten men.”

“I hear that John and his father had problems.”

Karen took a deep breath. “Sometimes they were small things. I re¬
member he didn’t want John to take a bath because he said it cost too
much for the pilot light to heat the water. He’d shout at John, daring
him to take a punch. But John never did.” John Stanley maintained a
Depression Era mentality that never waned, and in reality had grown
obsessive over the years.

“Anything else?”

“When John was away in Iowa [serving time for the sodomy con¬
viction] and our father died, John felt he died because he was embar¬
rassed about the crime that was committed. He somehow felt he was
responsible for his father’s death.”

I got Karen a glass of water, and when she finished, I said it would
be of real importance to speak to her mother. Karen blanched.

John Wayne Gacy | 83

“My mother doesn’t talk to anyone,” she said. Karen took another
sip of water. Then there was a prolonged silence. She held the glass in
her hand and looked into it. Then she looked at me, saying, “But I’ll
try.”

It took weeks, but after Sam Amirante, Karen, and even Gacy him¬
self asked her to cooperate, I talked to Gacy’s mother, Marion, on the
phone at length. Marion had been employed by a pharmacy and had
worked her way up through the ranks so that she was a kind of phar¬
macist herself, albeit without a degree, ranking slightly above a phar¬
macist’s assistant. Though Gacy’s father continually berated young
John by calling him “dumb and stupid,” John and Marion were very
close.

Marion believed her son was being persecuted unjustly, and she
went on about that. But early in the conversation, she began talking
about John as an infant.

“John was late as a child, and when he came out, he was blue.”

“That must have been hard on you, Marion.”

“I did everything I could to help him. For months, I even gave him
daily enemas.”

“Pardon me?”

“I gave him enemas and suppositories because he had problems be¬
fore birth. He defecated inside the womb and that caused respiratory
problems.”

She deduced that John suffered meconium aspiration, in which a
baby inhales his own feces while in the womb and has difficulty
breathing because of it. At its worst, such a condition can cause pneu¬
monia or even a collapsed lung. Several days after his birth, she said,
he had what she described as breathing problems once again and be¬
came allergic to all kinds of milk. Rectal suppositories, she said, were
inserted to decrease the breathing problems.

“Who prescribed this?” It certainly didn’t seem like the proper pre¬
scription to me.

“I did. I am a trained pharmacist.”

“How long did you continue this treatment?”

“All the time for about his first three months.” Some might have

84 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

jumped to the conclusion that John’s mother was crazy herself and that
her particular kind of mothering hurt John. The early psychoanalytic
thinkers may have said that the enemas and suppositories made an older
Gacy think the world in general was threatening and that what she did
to John kept John from developing a full personality. I myself was sur¬
prised at her comments, but it was my feeling that while she saw things
in her own, sometimes curious, way, she wasn’t deranged at all.

Yet I thought it wise to travel to see Marion Gacy face-to-face.
When she opened the door to her home, the seventy-five-year-old
woman I saw was outrageously overweight, so much so that she found
it difficult to move around. We sat at the kitchen table, drinking cof¬
fee, my notebook out as I wrote down what she said.

“What was John’s father like?”

“He was like my own father. He was a great fisherman, a man, not
a mollycoddle. He was a strict guy, though, perfection personified.”

“Strict how?”

“Well, when the kids went out, they had to write out where they
were going, the address and the phone number and when they’d be
back. Things like that. John really didn’t trust anyone much.”

“Were there any medical problems?”

“He had some. Some from war injuries. He had a brain tumor, but
doctors said they couldn’t operate. That’s why his behavior changed all
the time. He could be verbally and physically abusive. Doctors said
that’s the way it was and I would have to live with it.” Marion seemed
resigned. She’d had a life that was sometimes difficult, and now with
John’s dire circumstances, it had gotten much worse. She revealed that
the elder Gacy was hospitalized in the first years of their marriage for
symptoms that included everything from total paralysis to headaches.
“Something in our son bothered my husband a lot, though.”

Once she finished speaking about her child and her husband, I
again brought up the fact that she said she’d given him suppositories
and enemas as a baby.

“I never said that. Never said that at all.” Her face reddened, and
she was having trouble breathing.

Marion must have been overcome by guilt, because she did indeed

John Wayne Gacy | 85

say it to me on the phone. More than likely, she had thought about
what she said and felt it might be interpreted that somehow she was at
fault regarding the murders her son John had committed. Mrs. Gacy
also described some very remarkable happenings. Young John would
sleepwalk and become completely unaware of his surroundings or ac¬
tions during these spells. She said that one evening, she put her son
down and the next morning noticed he had acquired a birthmark. The
mark had disappeared from her arm and reappeared on John’s, and she
described it as though it was a kind of supernatural, religious experi¬
ence. She also outlined another circumstance in which she had discov¬
ered that a tooth disappeared from her mouth. She looked at John
when he brushed his teeth; the tooth, she said, reappeared in John’s
mouth. Again she spoke of this as if it were a miracle of sorts.

“It just shows how close we were. He was just like me. He couldn’t
sleep for more than four hours at a time. He didn’t like to be alone, like
me. And, well, he was overweight.”

But unlike his helpless, aging mother who felt an overriding, un¬
spoken responsibility for her son’s crimes, Gacy was accused of mur¬
dering almost three dozen people.

I then spoke with Carol Hoff, Gacy’s second wife, about whether or
not she felt something was awry when she lived with the murderer.

“Carol, were there things that weren’t normal going on at the
house?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Did you ever smell anything that was different or unusual?”

“Yes, a bad stink, and I asked John about it.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, We have a lot of mice and we’re putting down lime to
stop the smell.’”

“Was there anything suspicious that you had seen?”

“No, not at all.”

“Why did the marriage end?”

“He was never around anymore, too busy with his contracting busi¬
ness and with doing things for the neighbors. He just wasn’t available.
He was always working.”

86 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“There was a young man he brought into the house to live, John
Butkovich. John later killed him.”

“I had no idea that there was anything going on there. Little John
was a kid who needed somewhere to stay. John said we were doing a
good thing by letting him live with us. And I thought, Gee, what could
possibly be wrong with that? It was a shock to hear that John did those
things, a real shock.”

It’s generally true that family and neighbors are often stunned when
someone they think they know very well becomes involved in a crime
like murder. Because Gacy was so involved with his community, the
news was especially jarring. Gacy not only ran a flourishing contract¬
ing company, but also fixed things like faucets for neighbors without
charging them. Carol was a nice, quiet person who had two affable
daughters from a previous marriage. Outwardly, they seemed like the
perfect suburban family. When he wasn’t with his wife and stepdaugh¬
ters, he was doing charity work. Gacy designed an outfit and dressed
up as a character he called Pogo the Clown to entertain sick children
in local hospitals, and he gave huge yearly backyard parties where hun¬
dreds of people—including well-known local politicians—were enter¬
tained and fed. He organized Chicago’s mammoth Polish Day Parade.
First Lady Rosalynn Carter came and posed for a photograph with
Gacy. Lillian Grexa, who lived near the murderer and even prepared
Polish sausage for Gacy’s 1972 wedding reception, told me that John
was “better than a neighbor. He was a good friend.” Gacy wasn’t
merely well liked. He was admired.

But Lillian Grexa didn’t know the nighttime John Gacy. It was dur¬
ing the wee hours of the night that Gacy haunted a then-sketchy area
of Chicago. Called Bughouse Square because of its proximity to flop-
houses of the 1800s, the three-acre park was popular with local bo¬
hemians and radicals in the early 1900s. They gathered there from
their cold-water flats and cheap hotels to argue and rant and face the
occasional rotten tomato. Legendary Scopes monkey trial lawyer
Clarence Darrow and political activist Emma Goldman even debated
there. Today, the tree-filled park is surrounded by an upscale neigh¬
borhood of high-rises, and a yearly park festival commemorates those

John Wayne Gacy | 87

long-gone original bohemians with food, entertainment, and debating
contests. In Gacy’s time, however, Bughouse Square was a run-down,
seedy place where male prostitutes plied their trade.

Though word had spread quickly about how Gacy engaged in
rough sex and circled the park in his black Oldsmobile outfitted with
a police spotlight and scanner, many male prostitutes in dire need of
money paid no heed. Sometimes Gacy appeared as a gruff-voiced po¬
lice officer, complete with fake ID. At other times, he was his affable,
outgoing self. Gacy acknowledged frequenting these prostitutes many
times without killing or threatening to attack them. He bragged to one
police investigator that he had 1,500 bisexual relationships in seven
years (150 of which were homosexual encounters). Because that meant
almost one per day, it was probably, as far as I can tell, inaccurate. The
comment reminded me of Richard Macek when he was asked how
many days in a year there were. Macek said “Two hundred and five.”
Gacy wasn’t exaggerating so much as pulling a number out of thin air.

But if a boy tried to hike the price for services rendered or if Gacy
he felt threatened by him in any way, Gacy would get riled up and, by
the night’s end, end his life. After bringing a boy to his home, the way
an animal brings its prey to its lair, Gacy would begin toying with him.
To avoid the prospect of a swift getaway, Gacy would show handcuffs
to the victim, then manipulate him into trying them on by saying it
was a trick. Once his victim was incapacitated, he’d say, “There’s no key
to let you go. That’s the trick.” Like a magician in a bad B movie, he’d
then say, “I have one more trick to show you. The rope trick.” He
would tie a rope around the neck of the still-handcuffed youth, knot
it, place a board between the knots, and twist it with a stick, creating
a kind of primitive garrote.

After the boy at his feet was nude and unconscious, Gacy might
take photographs of the tortured victim. When a boy regained con¬
sciousness, he’d twist the rope again, taking away his precious air, re¬
peating the process until the boy expired. Any thinking individual
would have thought the authorities would have been so astonished by
reports of the crimes, they would have arrested Gacy directly. But they
repeatedly looked the other way.

88 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

One of the first examples of law enforcement’s blunders regarding
the Gacy case occurred with nineteen-year-old college student Robert
Donnelly. While Donnelly walked to a bus stop, Gacy turned on the
Oldsmobile’s blinding spotlight and aimed it at him. After informing
the frightened Donnelly that he was a policeman, Gacy shouted, or¬
dering Robert into his car. Then he handcuffed Donnelly and drove to
his house. He forced him inside, where he tormented the boy mentally,
physically, and sexually.

“My, aren’t we having fun tonight?” Gacy asked.

Taking a pistol, Gacy pointed it at Donnelly’s head.

“Why are you doing this?” asked the boy, quavering, stuttering. He
often stuttered, but now it was more noticeable. He thought he was
going to die.

Ignoring Donnelly’s plea, Gacy proclaimed, “There’s one bullet in
here.”

After waving the gun around, Gacy decided to play a game of Rus¬
sian roulette. Each time he took his finger to spin the cylinder of the
gun, each time it clicked as the cylinder turned, Donnelly felt he
would die. Gacy then pulled the trigger, once, twice, many times.
Donnelly wanted it all to be over; he had already been raped, humili¬
ated, and injured, and now he just wanted it to end. When the gun fi¬
nally fired, Donnelly squinted, shutting his eyes as tight as he could.
In a moment, he realized the bullet was merely a blank. It was another
of Gacy’s cruel pranks. Gacy laughed.

Gacy then led a dazed and wounded Robert to his bathroom, took
his head, and pushed it under a bathtub full of tap water. Quickly, Robert’s
larynx tightened and closed. He felt a stifling, panicky suffocation.
Gasping and coughing, Donnelly passed out. When Donnelly regained
consciousness, Gacy forced his head underwater again. Gacy did this
again and again until Donnelly was confused and began to turn blue.

“Please. Just kill me,” begged Robert. Dazed, he felt he had been
drowned four times. He had been tortured all night long and said he
couldn’t take it anymore. As the morning broke and Gacy felt the need
to ready for work at his contracting business, he released Donnelly,
telling him to shower. Then he drove him to work.

John Wayne Gacy | 89

When police investigated the case, they strongly suggested to assis¬
tant state attorney Jerry Latherow that Gacy be brought up on charges
of kidnapping and deviant sexual assault. Startlingly, Latherow didn’t
believe Donnelly. Perhaps because Donnelly was in therapy and ap¬
peared to Latherow as possibly mentally unstable, Latherow didn’t
think the charges would hold up in court. And because Donnelly stut¬
tered and spoke slowly, Latherow didn’t believe a jury would convict
Gacy.

Though Gacy dumped a few of the bodies into the Des Plaines
River and the Illinois River, he dragged twenty-nine of them into his
crawl space, shoving them into shallow graves that he, along with his
unwitting workers, had dug beneath the house. Arranged in a kind of
circle, the dead were placed like spokes on a bicycle wheel. As he’d told
his wife, Gacy did sometimes toss lime in the crawl space, but it was
really to help speed up the decomposition of the bodies and to cover
the smell of death, not mice.

When the police dug under the house, they found ten bodies that
were so miserably rotted, skeletized, and putrefied that the cause of
death could never be determined. Bodies were found with ropes tied
about the neck. And those that weren’t yet so decomposed were dis¬
covered to have wads of material placed far back past the throat and
into the esophagus, probably to stop massive bleeding onto the floors
of neat freak Gacy’s home. Cook Country Medical Examiner Dr.
Robert Stein theorized that some of the victims may well have been
buried alive and that they tried desperately to dig themselves out.
Gacy, who transported bodies into the crawl space late at night, as¬
sumed that each person was a cadaver. But they may have been merely
battered and unconscious and, according to Stein, would have lived
had they been given the chance.

Police had tailed Gacy for some time, watching him constantly
after screwing up some earlier half-baked attempts at undercover work.
Gacy even found them observing him, sought them out, and went to
a restaurant with them, nervously trying to impel them to come over
to his way of thinking: that they were following him for no good rea¬
son. But once they searched Gacy’s suburban ranch home at 8213

90 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Summerdale Avenue, Gacy did make his confession. Later, in retract¬
ing what he had said, he claimed he was hung over and on drugs when
he confessed. He said he was overtired when the statements were made,
and indeed he was exhausted. The murderer was so worried about
being caught that he hadn’t slept for days.

Gacy was no more manipulative than any other serial killer. That’s
not to say he didn’t manipulate with vigor. Because he murdered at
least thirty-three young men and teens, he cajoled and coerced more
than most modern-day killers, and the story was told around the world
by the news media ... on a daily basis. In fact, with the advent of
mogul Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, headlines and one-minute
summaries about Gacy were beamed out to the world hourly. And the
newspapers! They had field days as gory headlines boosted circulation.
There were stereotyped stories about serial-killing monsters, stories
that seemed to want to make people not only fear Gacy but also be
wary beyond vigilance: again and again they cautioned that a serial
killer could be lurking in anyone’s backyard.

On a one-to-one basis, Gacy himself was one scary guy, smugly
smiling through many of his early conversations with me. And each
time I received a typewritten letter from him as addendum to our con¬
versations, I was reminded of his twisted point of view from headline-
like Gacy-isms he had placed atop his letterhead: “Execute Justice . . .
Not People!!!” or “Execution . . . Revenge for a sick society!!!” It was
into all of this that I would be thrust if I decided to agree to work with
Gacy for Sam Amirante.

SIX

THE C)ACY INTERVIEWS

O n one cold winter night, while being driven through Cabrini
in a cab, I barely avoided a thug who skulked up to the cab
at a stoplight and tried to force open the door to rob me with a long
knife. The cab pulled away just before the man could force his way
inside.

In the late 1970s, it was not the safest place to be at night, not for
me, not for anyone—especially since it served as the opening scene to
many of John Gacy’s murders during his four-year crime rampage.
About five blocks away from the crime-plagued Cabrini Green, that
sprawling low-income housing project known nationally for its gangs,
drugs, and violence, was the notorious Bughouse Square.

On that freezing winter night, I felt it was important to retrace
some of Gacy’s steps as he picked up local hustlers. There is, even
though I am a doctor, a fair amount of investigative work in my re¬
search. Bughouse Square was full of leafless trees whose scraggly
branches reached over muddy footpaths that snaked through the run¬
down park. As I walked, occasionally a shadowy figure would emerge
from behind one of the trees, stare at me until I was frightened, and
then pass silently into the night. As a frigid wind blew through the
park, I was thankful for my black earmuffs. I rubbed my hands to¬
gether for warmth and continued my search.

92 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

It was not hard to find one. Half lit by a streetlight, he stood on a
corner in jeans and a black jacket, waiting.

“Excuse me. How are you?”

“All right. . . . What do you want?” He appeared a little startled.

“I just want to talk. Have you heard about John Wayne Gacy?”

“Are you with the police?”

“No, I just want to talk.”

Streetwise and fidgety, he spoke with a slightly feminine voice.
“Yeah. I certainly know about him. Everybody knows about him.”

After saying he’d read about Gacy in the papers, he admitted he’d
even met Gacy. “Sure, I knew John Gacy. I had sex with him. He
wanted to give it rough. He didn’t hurt me . . . much.”

“Weren’t you warned about him?”

“Everyone around here said to be careful. We knew he could be vi¬
olent. That’s what we heard.” He spoke with a kind of bravado, like
he’d been on the front lines of a war.

“Then why did you go with him?”

He shifted his weight and looked at the ground for a moment. “Per¬
son’s got to make a living, honey.” With that he walked away into the
darkness of the park. The brief encounter and the trip gave me some
insights into how people picked up the prostitutes at Bughouse Square
as well as the culture that existed there. Familiarity with the Bughouse
scene would help me not only as a researcher but also as someone who
had to speak to Gacy about his crimes.

Not long after this, I was called to the hospital in an emergency sit¬
uation. I was told that Gacy was contemplating suicide. After I arrived,
he calmed somewhat. When I asked him about it, the way Gacy ex¬
plained his nature was certainly scarier than the person I met in the
park, and it chilled me more than the freezing temperature that winter
night.

“I think there are two distinct characters,” mused Gacy from a chair
in his guarded room at Cermak. As he talked, the tiny eight-by-fifteen-
foot room seemed to grow smaller, and I felt a bit claustrophobic. Gacy
continued. “One body, two persons. The active person, John Gacy, has
fifteen characters, not personalities, see? Fifteen different characters

The Gacy Interviews | 93

evolved in one man. The sex drive, when it breaks in, it’s two people.
John Gacy and Jack Hanley.”

“Okay.” I quickly regained my composure and thought to myself,
Is this a crock?

“This guy Jack controls me. Eighteen hours of the day. Sometimes
twenty-four. But apparently when he’s been drawn down and, not only
by alcohol or drugs, and that, but evidently right at the crest, when I
got angered, he picked them up. He comes out. He comes out! He’s
got loose morals. He’s got loose ideas. And you know, anything
goes . . . How the hell do I get him out? I don’t know how to talk to
him. I don’t know how to bring him out.”

“I see.” It was just not possible that John had any kind of split per¬
sonalities, since he didn’t display the classic symptoms, symptoms that
are seen very rarely in clinical practice. Dr. Morton Prince introduced
the concept of split personalities in 1898 when he reported the case of
Miss Christine Beauchamp, a Radcliffe student who showed three dis¬
tinct personalities: saint, devil, and woman. With split personalities,
there are situations in which a person can become stressed, and that
stress leads him to go into another personality. Gacy often killed when
he was under no pressure whatsoever. Still, I wanted to hear what he
had to say.

“The only logical conclusion is one’s gotta kill the other. If you can’t
separate the two, then you gotta kill both of them. I don’t think I’m
suicidal, but I’m afraid.”

“You think you’re out of control when you’re doing, or not doing,
something.”

“The fear. Scared of what? There’s nobody here except me, but I’m
afraid of myself And afraid I’m going to hell.” But Gacy really had no
concept of hell, at least as opposed to heaven. When he later talked
about Jesus Christ and Satan, it was clear to me that he had developed
no clear distinction between the two in his mind. To him, they were
the same being. Gacy couldn’t differentiate among people, nor could
he differentiate among concepts that were more far more complex, ab¬
stract, and philosophical.

He even asked me to hypnotize him so we could find out what

94 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

caused his crimes. I remembered what had happened with Richard
Macek and said, “The problem with hypnotizing is this. We could get
you into a state and might not be able to bring you out again. That’s
why I won’t do it.” (In fact, no one would do it.) Since the turmoil
within Gacy was exponentially worse than what was within Macek, I
did not know what would occur. In addition, there was the chance that
under hypnosis, Gacy might have displayed the same kinds of injuries
he suffered while torturing his victims. Gacy could have hurt himself
far more than Macek did with those blisters that spontaneously and
mysteriously arose on his hand.

Undaunted, Gacy continued. “If that state would be where you’d
uncover what really happened, and if I’m that way, I really don’t want
to live, anyway.” Outwardly, he seemed to feel trapped, that he wanted
to do something, anything, to change his circumstance. And he said he
had methods of suicide that would work. “I could jump off in the
courtroom and jump the judge. I could kill myself.”

“How would you kill yourself?”

“In here? I could do the rope trick to myself. Secondly, I could hang
myself with a rope. If I was really bent on suicide, any time they took
me on a trip, I’d bust away from them. They have orders that if I es¬
cape, don’t even bother coming back. Them goddamn mothers up
there—they’re gun happy and they probably would blow me away in a
second if they had they a chance.

“Yet, you know something, if I was really bent on escape, I’ve had
at least five opportunities to disarm an officer. They trust me. While I
was at County Hospital [a few weeks ago], they’re all there with their
guns, sleeping in the chairs. . . . Then again, I could suffocate myself.
I could take blankets. I could burn the mattresses, start a fire, rip open
the matches and start a fire in this gas stuff [he meant the old oxygen
tank connectors] here near the door. These plastic bags, put your head
right in the bag. Tie it. You can suffocate. At one time I had a razor
blade, but that’s such a sloppy mess, and there’s no guarantee.”

“That’s right.”

Gacy was never a person of a few words. A self-proclaimed “motor-
mouth,” every time he spoke, he ran on and on, often writing what he

The Gacy Interviews | 95

said or what I said in his ledger book as we spoke. The clinical name
for such a condition is logorrhea, one of the symptoms seen in persons
who are in a manic state. They talk on and on, even if they’re not hy¬
peractive, and they can’t seem to stop. Gacy was somewhat like a radio
talk show host in that he seemed to love to hear himself speak. He was
everywhere when he spoke, all over the map, ranting, explaining, ca¬
joling, imparting what he believed were truths. The surprising under¬
current to many of his verbalizations was his belief that he was the
victim. No matter that he raped. No matter that he tortured. No mat¬
ter that he killed mercilessly. He was the one who was being persecuted
by everyone else, and he reveled in voicing his rationalizations to all
who would lend an ear.

On another gray afternoon in January 1980, Gacy began to tell sto¬
ries about his childhood. He recalled being eight or nine years old,
about having a young friend who had polio, and playing with him
when other kids wouldn’t. Then he mentioned dreaming of the
wheelchair-bound child’s father, “of looking at his father in a swimsuit
or something, the muscular build.” So did that statement indicate that
John was gay early on? Absolutely not. Again, Gacy did not distinguish
between men and women sexually or otherwise. It was as though peo¬
ple were one sex to him.

Then, knowing what I knew about Gacy’s history, he mentioned
two things that were a bit frightening and momentarily gave me the
shivers. “I can remember when us kids were small, we used to play
about the Black Hand. The Black Hand will get you. Scared the shit
out of them every time.

“Then we used to go over to the Jewish cemetery and take the flow¬
ers. I used to collect the papier-mache buckets and separate the Styro¬
foam and all the ribbons and all the artificial flowers. We’d have a
wedding and we’d use all the funeral flowers. Once we found a dead
dog. We’d get all these flowers and get like the casket and spread it over
the whole wagon with this dead dog with the flowers on it. Had to
bury the poor dog.”

I asked Gacy if there was a time during his youth in which he be¬
came frightened of things like monsters and ghosts. He shrugged and

96 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

said that he hadn’t. “But you wanna know something? When I was a
kid, I was afraid of firemen. Whenever I heard a fire truck, I would run
like hell for home. Because they used to go by so fast and they were
blurry on their faces, they looked like monsters. You couldn’t see no
face on those trucks. You just seen a blur.”

I was at a momentary loss. I had no idea from where his fear came,
especially since most children like fire engines and firemen. As Gacy
indicated, it may actually have been the unpredictable noise of the
sirens that frightened him, but most boys want to be firemen. I took
the statement at face value, and certainly Gacy couldn’t figure out pre¬
cisely why he was scared. Gacy equated firefighters and blurry faces
with monsters. That was all.

Gacy then mentioned his compulsion to steal panties, which first
began with stealing his mother’s silky underwear off the line and hid¬
ing it in a paper bag under his porch. He also pilfered underwear from
various clotheslines as the mood struck him, often when he worked at
a local store delivering groceries to neighbors’ houses. It continued
through his teens. “I used to masturbate with them. When I was four¬
teen or fifteen, I just took ’em all at once and I was burning garbage
out in the alley, so I burned all of them. But they wouldn’t burn. They
actually melted, because of the acetate in them. Some of the guys I
went out with would be wearing girls’ underwear and I would take it
from them.”

“It wasn’t the smell or anything like that?”

“The feeling of it. I’d keep it and never use it for nothing. Just liked
the silky feeling when I was a kid.” It was the same with Gacy’s mas¬
turbating with the panties. It wasn’t that the panties had sexual mean¬
ing to him. He just liked the feeling of them in his hand and on his
body. To him, it was about simple comfort and quick release and not
about fantasies or dreams.

During the time we spent at Cermak Hospital, Gacy’s perception of
me would vary, to say the least. Sometimes I was a friend. Sometimes
he would lash out at me. Sometimes he saw me as a doctor. Sometimes
he saw me as “dumb and stupid.” Sometimes he saw me simply as

The Gacy Interviews | 97

someone who would bring him magazines or cut through the red tape
at the hospital.

On the surface, of course, Gacy liked to portray himself as power¬
ful and influential. And he seemed to be smooth, and occasionally
suave. But there was always something ambivalent about Gacy, even
when he spoke of those closest to him. Even when his mother, the per¬
son closest to him in the world, was ill, he couldn’t express anything
but the facts of her situation. Of these inconstant emotions, he was al¬
ways unaware. There were periods when, even though he was incar¬
cerated, he felt he could rule the world. These then alternated with
feelings of being down. Gacy would say he was lonely and lost and
confused. He even said he had lost all will to live. But I believe that’s
what he thought people expected him to say. Both his elation and his
despondency were extreme. He never tried to hurt himself, but he sure
talked a blue streak about how up or down he was. For a while, he
would become suspicious, his face seeming to change subtly. Then he
would flash that creepy smile of his and start gabbing again.

During one of our meetings, I gave Gacy a language test and asked
him to characterize what was happening in these sentences: “Arthur
threw the ball into the woods. Barbara was very angry.”

Gacy made his answer into an elaborate story, beginning:

It seemed to me that Arthur and Barbara were playing ball and that
Arthur threw the ball into the woods. She may have thought he did it
on purpose. The [ sic\ again it may be that she was his mother, and
thought that he was being disobedient. She may have told him not to
throw it in the woods and he was showing that he was going to do
what he wanted. There is a lot of things a person could take from the
two sentences. Maybe is Arthur was too young to understand, that it
was an accident. I can’t see why she became very angry, unless she was
drinking or not feeling well. Everyone is not perfact and can make
mistakes. Barbara was very angry maybe she missed the ball herself,
and thats why she was mad. The question doesn’t tell if Barbara was
angry at Arthur, it just assumption. Maybe they are both older and the
ball came into there backyard and instead of throwing it back he

98 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

through it into the woods out of spite, and his wife got angry at his
action, because he took such action.

Although Gacy had an above-average intellect, he lapsed into a very
primitive mode of thought. His sentence structure disintegrated into
thoughts propelled by such sheer impulse that they were disjointed.
There was no focus, just a series of unconnected thoughts. A normal
person would come up with a structured beginning, a middle, and an
end to the story, maybe like this: Arthur threw the ball into the woods
because he wanted to see Barbaras reaction. Barbara was very angry be¬
cause Arthur had done this before. So Arthur went and got the ball and
Barbara was happy again.

As I’ve mentioned, he did not know how to restrain himself ver¬
bally. Throughout much of his life, his impulses and his wishes were
most likely experienced as stimuli coming from outside himself. It was
almost as if he felt he were drowning when subjected to emotional
complexity of any sort. He couldn’t sit back, think, and come to a log¬
ical conclusion. When confronted with the complexity of others, he
fell apart. He didn’t think; he acted. He didn’t pause; he pounced. For
instance, if he thought a person to be “dumb and stupid” and the per¬
son didn’t act that way, that same person might well become a victim.

One evening, I received a short note from Gacy saying, “Just
thought I would drop this short note, and enclose my latest fan mail,
as you can see he used the words dumb and stupid, just like I do.” The
note was anonymous and carefully written by hand. After expressing
the hope that Gacy would be given the electric chair, the writer began
to rant:

You are dumb, you really are, you are real super-stupid and dumb
since you were caught in all of those crimes you committed, no mat¬
ter what you had before or what you were like before, you are real stu¬
pid, stupid, dumb. . . . You are, right now, royally, and always be
dumb, you are really super, extra stupid, extra dumb. . . . You don’t
have enough sense or intelligence to be insane, you’re too dumb to be
that. You’re too stupid to be crazy.

The Gacy Interviews | 99

It was a haunting note, as though his abusive father were writing
him, chastising him from the grave. But if it gave Gacy any pause, he
didn’t mention it. It was not in him to feel grieved by so complex an
idea. It simply was something to add to a bland letter that mentioned
trite facts about his lawyer, his sister, and his mother. (He never once
mentioned Carol in letters, since they were divorced and he never saw
her anymore.)

But there was nothing trite about what was about to come—the
media circus of the Gacy trial itself. In a way, I dreaded the idea of it.
The publicity, the newspaper and TV reporters, could very well dis¬
tract me from my work. The press constantly indicated that Gacy’s
murders were homosexual crimes, and some even called Gacy an
“avowed homosexual.” It was a truly antigay tactic that was perpetu¬
ated throughout the trial and before, one that almost seemed to glory
in leading readers to believe that murder was a punishment for homo¬
sexuality. At the same time, I was curious to see how it all played out.
How would Gacy fare before the court? Would he sit quietly or break
under the pressure? And how would the court and the jury react to
what I had to say about the man who had become the world’s most no¬
torious serial murderer?

SEVEN

TAKING THE STAND AT
THE CjACY TRIAL

I t would be a first for me, my first experience as an expert witness
in a high-profile criminal trial. As the trial date approached, it be¬
came clear that this would be a pivotal moment in my career as a foren¬
sic psychiatrist who researches serial murderers. Because of the
surrounding publicity, I already guessed I’d gain access to many more
serial murderers in the future. Gacy’s attorneys had given me all the in¬
formation they had. I had spoken at length to Gacy, and I felt I had
seen enough and read enough information to testify that he was a dis¬
turbed person who could not have been considered normal. Further¬
more, by studying him during this particular case I had learned a lot
not only about Gacy but also about serial killers. What struck me most
was that there was more than one person who was so similar to Richard
Macek. Every time I saw Gacy, I thought to myself, This is like seeing
Macek in a different body.

All these thoughts swirled around in my head as I was about to take
the stand for the defense of John Wayne Gacy, in an effort not to free
him, but to get him a life sentence as opposed to death by the electric
chair.

Gacy’s attorneys Sam Amirante and Robert Motta would do their

102 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

best to convince the jury that Gacy’s life should be spared because he
was legally insane. A coterie of well-known psychiatrists for both the
defense and the prosecution, each armed with at least slightly different
points of view, was called to the stand to comment upon Gacy’s state
of mind prior to and during his crimes. But the quality of some of the
psychiatric testimony at Gacy’s trial made me wonder whether some
psychologists and psychiatrists are simply hired guns. While I had got¬
ten used to the boys clubs in law enforcement and accepted them as
people who didn’t really understand the medical community, the Gacy
case brought up another barrier. I saw how petty men in the psychi¬
atric community could be. If you didn’t agree with them, the insults
would fly and you’d become an instant enemy not only inside the
courtroom but outside as well. It wasn’t professional and I didn’t like
it, but that’s the way it was.

As the trial began, the jury tried valiantly to make sense of the com¬
plicated individual that was Gacy, and the complex case that all the at¬
torneys had concocted. But as the facts behind the murders became
known to the jury, so did the finite aspects of the insanity defense. The
state penal code held that “a person is not criminally responsible for
conduct if at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or
defect, he lacks substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his
conduct or to conform to the requirement of law.” The law seemed
fairly ambiguous to me, but after sixty hours with Gacy, it became ev¬
ident to me that he was medically insane at the time of the killings.
During this time, I was studying for a health law degree, so I was im¬
mersed in definitions and the philosophy of law. It not only led me to
be privy to the way the law works, but it led me to understand the lan¬
guage of the law and how to use it when speaking to lawyers and law
enforcement types. For the purpose of the Gacy case, the law defined
mental disease or mental defect as something that didn’t include “ab¬
normality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial
conduct.” This means that simply because Gacy committed a series of
murders didn’t mean his lawyers had a basis for the insanity defense.
Beyond this, the Illinois Supreme Court at the time said that evidence
of a sociopathic personality, mental disease, or defect was not sufficient

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

103

to establish the insanity defense. Furthermore, according to state law,
the young lawyers had to prove that John Gacy was so overwhelmed by
his mental disease that he didn’t comprehend that what he was doing
was criminal. It would be no easy task. (The insanity defense does
work, but it works only occasionally. It worked for Ed Gein, for in¬
stance, who spent ten years in an mental institution before he was
competent enough to stand trial. Gein was judged to be guilty of mur¬
der, but criminally insane. That’s how he ended up in Mendota, where
I met him, and not in jail.)

The Gacy courtroom itself was full of drama early on: the prose¬
cuting lawyers postured; witnesses broke down; and in the gallery, par¬
ents of the victims grew woozy and sometimes fainted. Gacy himself
sat there at the defense table, blank faced and rigid, his lawyers some¬
what concerned about his heart, as he had been taken to the hospital
earlier during his incarceration, feeling faint, his nose dripping blood.
Some time later, when the defense began to call witnesses, the jury lis¬
tened as victim and defense witness Jeff Rignall stated that Gacy could
not have understood the law “because of the beastly ways he attacked
me.” Rignall, queasy in a recollection so detailed he must have reexpe¬
rienced the attack in his mind, then lay his head on the witness stand
and vomited. Rignall wept so incessantly that he had to be helped from
the courtroom. Nonetheless, Amirante felt that Rignall had helped
him begin to prove that Gacy was legally insane.

Amirante continued his efforts to bolster the insanity defense. He
called clinical psychologist Thomas Eliseo as a witness for the defense.
The expert on schizophrenia shocked the jury somewhat when he
leaned forward and explained that Gacy was extraordinarily intelligent,
in the top 10 percent of the population. After a minutely detailed look
at various psychological tests he performed on John, Eliseo testified
that Gacy should be “classified as a schizophrenic, classified as a para¬
noid.” He went on to say that Gacy “is a borderline personality, a per¬
son who on the surface looks normal but has all kinds of neurotic,
antisocial, psychotic illnesses.” Certainly one of the more sympathetic
witnesses, he explained that Gacy was a paranoid schizophrenic, some¬
one who believes there are “constant dangers out there.” People, at any

104 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

time, could try to get you, wound you, even kill you, said Eliseo about
Gacy’s state of mind.

Big and brash, prosecutor William Kunkle dismissed the idea of in¬
sanity, bashing away at Eliseo, saying that if Gacy seemed normal, he
must have been normal, not schizophrenic.

Psychiatrist Lawrence Freedman, then chairperson of the Institu¬
tion of Social and Behavioral Pathology, was an accomplished profes¬
sional whose vita itself was long, detailed, and impressive. He said that
Gacy was primarily psychotic but also was neurotic, which he defined
as a compulsion that bothered or saddened him, but one that didn’t
impair him from doing his day-to-day work. He said Gacy had no feel¬
ing for any of the people he killed and that he was obsessive and com¬
pulsive. While he admitted that he diagnosed Gacy as a paranoid
schizophrenic, he would not go so far as to say Gacy was legally insane.
Furthermore, under questioning from Kunkle, he said he had never
seen John in a dissociated condition, a state in which two or more per¬
sonalities are found to live within someone, personalities that reveal
themselves at various times. While John often claimed he had different
personalities that he assumed when engaged in killing, including that
of a gruff police officer, Freedman seemed to be saying he never was
witness to any of these personalities in the fifty hours that he spent di¬
agnosing Gacy’s condition.

Dr. Robert Traisman spoke to Gacy for only three and a half hours.
Still, after administering a draw-the-person test (in which the patient
is given a pad and pen and asked to sketch), he diagnosed Gacy as not
feeling strongly about his masculine identity. He called Gacy an am¬
bulatory schizophrenic, someone who, as Dr. Traisman theorized,
would appear ordinary to most people who spoke to Gacy casually.
But, in Traisman’s opinion, Gacy was anything but normal.

Richard Rappaport, a forensic psychiatrist, spent sixty-five hours
studying Gacy. Once on the stand, he told the court that there were no
physiological problems with Gacy that would have led to mental ill¬
ness. He did comment that Gacy had what’s called an XXY chromo¬
some arrangement. Also called Klinefelter’s syndrome, this genetic
mutation, discovered in the early 1970s, meant that Gacy was born

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial | 105

with a supposed predisposition for acting badly and violently. It’s a cu¬
rious aberration said to occur anywhere between one in five hundred and
one in one thousand births, and today, this theory of genetic anomaly
has its critics. Otherwise, Dr. Rappaport called Gacy a borderline per¬
sonality and agreed with Dr. Freedman’s diagnosis. He also thought
that John had great difficulty in forming a strong opinion; he would
present all sides of an issue and would rarely come down firmly on one.

When Amirante questioned Dr. Rappaport, he said that John was a
paranoid schizophrenic who was unable “to control his behavior at the
time of each of those crimes.” Dr. Rappaport was positive Gacy was
powerless to “conform his conduct to the requirements of law.” Dr. Rap¬
paport was talking about the crime of murder. But you might ask, How
could this be true if Gacy could conform to the rules and regulations of
imprisonment? If he could function in prison, did that mean he wasn’t
insane? Not at all. Insanity doesn’t mean the patient is running down the
street, wild-eyed and naked, in utter chaos. Insanity doesn’t mean the pa¬
tient can’t follow the rules. Imagine the most paranoid person in the
world, for example, a person who swears all his neighbors are after him,
a person who may kill somebody on the basis of a paranoid delusion.
That same person is usually the consummate rule observer, an absolute
stickler. He can still abide by the rules of a structured environment, and
so could a serial killer like Gacy.

When it was his turn to ask questions, William Kunkle tried to rile
Rappaport. But he couldn’t. Rappaport stuck to his guns about Gacy’s
psychosis, even when Kunkle brought up the fact that Gacy conducted
his contracting business on the phone while the dead body of Robert
Piest was still in the room.

The time for my testimony came at 10 A.M. on Saturday, March 8.
During the week prior to my appearance in court, I pored over my
notes about John and immersed myself in the transcripts of our con¬
versations. While Amirante and Motta met with me about the case,
they did not coach me and they did not rehearse the questions that
they would pose while I was a witness. (I certainly wouldn’t have stood
for any sort of instructions on what to say.) They did, however, ask me
generally about my diagnosis.

106 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

We talked in the law office for a while about Gacy’s mood, and fi¬
nally Amirante asked, “Do you feel that, after examining him fully,
that he is insane?”

“Yes, Sam, I do.” And that was all he needed to hear.

Though I was mildly anxious about appearing in a trial with so much
publicity attached, I was not a stranger to the process of testifying in a
courtroom. I had spoken as a witness over 250 times in civil trials where
my focus was to diagnose whether or not a person was mentally ill and
required hospitalization. But there are two major differences between a
civil trial and a criminal case. In interviews before a criminal trial, I tell
the patient that whatever he says is not going to be held in confidence.
And in a criminal trial the law is more complicated; I have to deal with
the legal definition of insanity in addition to the medical definition.

Whether it’s baking a pie or speaking before a group of people, once
you’ve done it 250 times, you really don’t worry about the process too
much. Nevertheless, the whole world was looking at the goings-on at
the trial, and that kind of attention is a little unsettling.

Since it was a Saturday, my husband accompanied me to the court¬
room. For some reason, he was escorted to the defense table, where
John flashed him a big, creepy smile. He was far more uneasy than I
was; Gacy’s murderous smile stayed with him for some time.

Walking to the stand, I felt a bit nervous. After the clerk swore me
in, Motta, Amirante’s quieter, mustached partner, began his queries.
Once I sat down, the microphone at the stand was badly placed, so ini¬
tially, those in the courtroom had some trouble hearing me. But once
they adjusted the mike, I settled down.

“Doctor, what is your diagnosis of Mr. Gacy in psychiatric terms?”
Motta put his hands in his pockets.

“In psychiatric terms, the diagnosis is mixed psychosis.”

I began to explain that John Gacy exhibited portions of different
mental diseases and symptoms. What was in Gacy’s brain was a very
complex network of mental disease, the various criteria of which I tried
to detail for the court and for the jury.

“Now, with relation to Mr. Gacy, can you explain, firstly, what you
mean by primitive psychotic defense mechanisms?”

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

107

“There is a defense called splitting, and that’s where the ego de¬
taches from reality. For example, in Mr. Gacy, this is shown by his lack
of memory for certain things.” By “certain things” I meant the killings
themselves along with the recollection of portions of his own life. I
added the idea that he had a grandiose view of himself, but his puffed-
up nature was combined with significant feelings of inferiority, the
same kind of cross some say a nerd would bear. So while he felt he
could do anything well, he also felt he would never measure up because
his father always called him “dumb and stupid.” In addition, Gacy had
a penchant for the psychological defense of projection. Painful ideas or
rage that welled up from inside him were placed upon another person.
That person, usually a victim, was then viewed as a terrible enemy. I
then tried to explain the difficult concept of projective identification,
where the person to whom Gacy was speaking became part of the
killer, taking on his characteristics. Projective identification refers to a
defense mechanism where one places blame for one’s difficulties on
others or attributes one’s own unacceptable impulses and actions to
others. First described by Freud in the Schreber case and later in Judge
Daniel Schreber’s autobiography Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, pro¬
jective identification can arouse feelings of hostilities, persecutory
delusions, suspiciousness, and hallucinations.

I also brought up John’s perpetual hypochondriasis. Most everyone
knows someone who constantly complains of illnesses that aren’t really
there. Lonely old Aunt Nellie might even magnify her pains to make
them severe enough to garner some sympathy. Gacy constantly com-
plainted that something was wrong with his body. In 1978, for in¬
stance, he was convinced he had leukemia. At other times, he was
hospitalized and then said he had strokes and heart attacks—palpable
delusions. It wasn’t real at all, but he felt it was real. In reality, these
were probably only fainting spells, certainly nothing that would keep
him from working or from appearing in court. Such swooning often
followed complaints of temperature changes. Gacy could walk from a
warm room into a cold room and faint dead away.

Motta wanted more clarity. “Did he actually manifest symptoms of
an illness that did not exist?”

108 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“Yes, he did. There are symptoms that are called autonomic. It
means that they are not under your physical control, like when you are
nervous and your palms start to sweat. You are not telling your palms
to sweat, but they do. And when you are really nervous, your heart
starts pounding. You are not telling your heart to do this, but it is
doing that because part of your nervous system is not under your con¬
trol. It shows how anxiety can be manifested in your body.”

Motta stroked his mustache. Then, he said, “Now as far as the sec¬
ond criteria that you have listed, aggression, expressed in polar attrib¬
utes. Can you please explain that?”

“Such a person has within himself simultaneously a hateful and a
powerful destructiveness but at the same time, an impotent or help¬
less or very vulnerable or weak kind of way of expressing aggression.”
It’s the type of aggression that moves like lightning, rapidly and very
dramatically. Gacy could be sweet as Ronald McDonald in his clown
outfit, treating kids to Hershey’s kisses. And within a fraction of a
second, he could become like an inflamed, incensed animal, thor¬
oughly out of control. Gacy never learned how to modulate his ag¬
gression as a child, and he never found a usable way, a way that was
accepted by family and friends, to release his anger as an adult. For
him, it was expelled as an explosion of no small proportion. It was an
all-body aggression—he felt it everywhere, from his pumping heart
to his joints to his very pores, which made the hair on his arms stand
up. To understand this, take a look at Gacy’s unrelenting torture of
Jeff Rignall.

John learned from his father how to release aggression. His father
was sometimes a silent if overly wary man who became the drunk who
hid away in his basement and then without reason or warning lashed
out, beating John physically. From this John learned that he could walk
into a room like Dr. Jekyll and transform into Mr. Hyde, which is the
way the father was described by his own family.

Motta wondered, “Is this something conscious that he did, or was
it unconscious?”

“These are all unconscious, not under his control. It’s like that au¬
tonomic nervous system. We can’t tell it to do it. It’s just there.”

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

109

“You mean behavioral pattern can be just as uncontrolled as your
palm sweating?”

“Yes, it can.”

“You also think he has difficulty in maintaining object constancy.
Explain that, please.”

“I mean, it’s like he doesn’t see you as a separate individual. You are
just part of him.” More generally, it’s a psychiatrist’s term for the foun¬
dation of psychological structure.

In an effort to describe this more fully, I said to the court that Gacy
had a problem with “maintaining intercohesiveness.” Intercohesiveness
is the ability to recognize the separateness of other people: your father,
your mother, your friends, and what they are doing for you. If you rec¬
ognize them as separate people, you have enough self-awareness to see
that they love you or have a personality that likes thoughtful people, or
gives you presents out of fondness, or makes you laugh when you’re
down. Since Gacy was not able to develop a separate and independent
identity from others, he identified with parts of them. Outside, he was
male. Inside, he was female, at least far more than he was a man.

“So is this also called confused sexual identity or—”

“Yes, and it can be a basis for what would be called bisexuality or
various forms of homosexuality.”

Motta asked me if I thought Gacy developed emotionally.

“He did not develop emotionally. He carried and has carried into
his adult life the emotional life of an infant.”

“His entire emotional makeup is that of. . .”

“An infant.”

Even though John Gacy progressed intellectually and had an above-
average IQ, these infantlike characteristics were, as an adult, expressed
as cringes of doubt, quakes of total helplessness, falling apart, and,
really, complete annihilation. His universe was rife with dark, shadowy
persecutors. It was a world full of constant danger, a deep, endless
world from which flowed paranoia. Overwhelming the murderer, para¬
noia was everywhere, as if it were a liquid pumped through Gacy’s
veins. Gacy had these prodigious, tangible fears, and he needed some¬
one to protect him. Gacy identified with his own kind of powerful

110 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

hero who could defend him from most kinds of persecution. Jack Han¬
ley, his alter ego who was a police officer, took care of all sorts of things
for John, protecting against his inner chaos and anxiety.

I said to the court that Hanley was Gacy’s “safety mechanism.”

“He wasn’t using it to establish a multiple personality, was he?”

“That’s too advanced. He was not using it for that purpose.”

“He needed some need for protection.”

“Safety, yes.”

It was safety against the rest of the world.

But more, part of Jack Hanley, the Jack that Gacy called Bad Jack,
was an asylum from Gacy’s terrible explosiveness. It was he who held
the key to explosive and murderous behavior. It was Bad Jack, not
Gacy, who killed. Gacy was absolutely certain he knew a Jack Hanley
well. When investigators finally tracked down James Hanley, the cop
from a hit-and-run unit who worked out of 54 West Hubbard Street,
Hanley said he merely was a patron at a restaurant where Gacy was a
cook in 1971. To Hanley, they were not friends at all. To Gacy, Han¬
ley was one of the most important people he’d every met. He fantasized
about him. He made him part of himself. He was Hanley, a warrior¬
like Hanley he created from somewhere deep inside of his being.

When Gacy’s feelings overwhelmed him, his psychological state
wasn’t stable. The minimal controls he had were shaky, and the violent
acts took over. And all of this could take place within moments. Emo¬
tions and feelings changed rapidly for Gacy, and he didn’t have enough
internal structure to keep track of what was happening, let alone pre¬
vent it. He became disorganized, unable to perceive what transpired in
even the most familiar of environments. His perception of others be¬
came grossly inconsistent and extremely variable. When I examined
Gacy, he was often unaware that he contradicted himself from one sen¬
tence to the next.

Motta asked, “You mean there’s consistency to his inconsistency?”

“Yes, because of the way he sees the world . . . there is an incapac¬
ity to really relate to other people.”

John Gacy did not see people with any sense of reality. They were

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

111

not well-rounded or complex and they had no variety of traits and
qualities. To Gacy, all people were dumb and stupid.

I said to the court, “ [For Gacy] there is no way of viewing another
person in their complexity. I mean, people to him are inanimate ob¬
jects. They have no life to them.”

Finally, Motta tried to ask me whether or not all of these conditions
made John Gacy kill.

“Objection!” cried Kunkle for the prosecution, and Judge Garippo
sustained the objection. Motta was annoyed but tried again, and Kun¬
kle still had a problem with the sentences construction. Then, in a
long and detailed but careful question that went on for seventy-eight
words, Motta rephrased his wording, and the court permitted me to
speak.

“My opinion is that Mr. Gacy has been suffering from a mental dis¬
ease over a period of time . . . from at least 1958 to the present time
and continually with his mental disease called mixed psychosis.”

To end the questioning, Motta asked me whether Gacy lacked
“substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct at the
time of each of the alleged acts.”

“Because of the mental disease that Mr. Gacy had, he was unable to
appreciate and conform his conduct during each of the acts.” In other
words, I believed he was medically insane when he committed each
and all thirty-three of his grisly murders.

On cross-examination, prosecution team member Robert Egan,
dressed in a new three-piece suit with a thick-knotted striped tie, force¬
fully made clear to the court that he believed a person who could plan
and kill thirty-three times was aware of what he was doing.

“The fact that he drove Robert Piest to his home would not change
your opinion as to the psychosis at that time, correct?”

“No, it would not.”

“The fact that he coerced Robert Piest into being handcuffed
would not change your opinion, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And the fact that he answered the telephone and spoke with a

112 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

business associate immediately after murdering Robert Piest would not
change your opinion. Is that right?”

“It would not.”

“By the way, do you think that under the circumstances, John Gacy
would have killed Robert Piest if there was a uniformed police officer
in the home with him at the time?”

“Yes, I do.” I made it as clear as I could that I felt Gacy could not
control his actions. Gacy would have done what he did if the president
of the United States were there with him at the time.

After two tense and fairly exhausting hours, it was over. After a brief
recess, my husband and I left the court building through a side exit,
avoiding the swarms of TV cameras and reporters.

While the defense had concluded their case, the prosecution had
just begun. Donald Voorhees took the stand, but he was so plagued by
his encounter with Gacy, that he took a long time to answer each ques¬
tion and more than once broke down on the witness stand. Dr.
Leonard Heston, a professor of psychiatry who spoke to Gacy in 1968,
said that Gacy suffered from no mental problems whatsoever. Instead,
according to Heston, he was merely antisocial and possessed a charac¬
ter flaw that made him want to kill.

Robert Donnelly testified that Gacy had plied him with drinks,
shackled him, jumped on top of him, and took off his pants. “He went
and he got on top of me and I could tell that he didn’t have any pants
on because I could feel his knees, and he, he put his knees between my
legs and grabbed my shoulders.” Donnelly couldn’t take it. He stut¬
tered painfully and collapsed amid a torrent of tears.

Gacy suddenly stirred in his chair. He gripped the table and sat up
as straight as his corpulent body would permit. In a move that sur¬
prised everyone, he rolled his eyes and laughed out loud so the jury
could hear him. It was not the first inappropriate comment he would
make when a witness was on the stand. Was there something deep
down within him that told him that these actions would help his in¬
sanity case? Or was he so steamed by Robert’s testimony that he felt he
had to defend himself by verbally mocking the witness? Whatever
John’s feelings, his outburst certainly could not help his cause.

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

113

The court took a break, and when Donnelly returned, somewhat
composed, he described the rape. He testified that Gacy banged his
head against the wall and intermittently put his head into the bathtub
full of water until he could not breathe. He kept Donnelly’s head
under until Donnelly became unconscious.

Then it happened again. Gacy snickered aloud. While John told his
lawyers that he thought that his outburst would counter what he saw
as the outrageously overblown nature of Donnelly’s testimony, some in
the jury must have taken it as laughter at the boy himself, as though a
demon were gloating over his handiwork. The reason for Gacy’s
shenanigans was simpler, in my opinion. In the courtroom, he was ex¬
periencing a lack of the familiar structure he’d become so accustomed
to in prison. Gacy couldn’t hold back and erupted in a way that he
shouldn’t have.

Longtime chief psychologist for the circuit court of Cook County
A. Arthur Harmon indicated that Gacy was merely antisocial, who,
like other antisocial personalities, lied his way through life. When
called to the stand, Harmon’s colleague Dr. Robert Reifman made no
bones about it. He said that Gacy was lying, making up things to lead
the jury to think he was insane. There was one succinct comment that
the jury would remember in particular. In terms plain and certain,
Reifman stated, “I don’t believe you can have thirty-three cases of tem¬
porary insanity.”

Dr. James Cavanaugh from St. Luke’s Medical Hospital in Chicago
really uttered something to the jury that I thought was highly inap¬
propriate and outside his purview as a forensic clinician. Fully antici¬
pating the bombshell to come, Kunkle asked if Gacy were to be
confined to a mental hospital, would he stay there for all of his life?

“Absolutely impossible,” said Cavanaugh flatly. Cavanaugh appar¬
ently believed that John could be somehow cured and readmitted to
society. That never would have happened. I thought it was unprofes¬
sional for Cavanaugh even to make such a prediction. It was highly
prejudicial, more like a comment that a lawyer for the prosecution
would make than something that would come from the mouth of a
supposedly unbiased expert in psychiatry. But don’t forget, he was

114 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

hired by the prosecution, and he became the prosecution. Cavanaugh
had seriously overstepped his boundaries, and the judge ordered the
jury to disregard this testimony.

Was Gacy a cold-blooded criminal who plotted his crimes and
knew precisely what he was doing or was he legally insane, driven by
urges that he would never be able to control?

I don’t think any of the defense lawyers or even John Gacy himself
believed that the jury would return a verdict of insanity. Though I
knew Gacy suffered from mixed psychosis and was medically insane at
the time of the murders, I was certainly a realist. The gravity of his
crimes, the rampant media attention, and the work of the prosecuting
attorneys all combined to make an impression on the jury. In addition,
I felt in my heart that there were too many psychologists and psychia¬
trists on the case. It was a matter of “too many cooks who spoiled the
broth.” Even though many tried their best to speak in layman’s terms,
some were full of scientific terms and theories that would bore,
frighten, or annoy the average person on the jury.

Summing up the case, prosecutor Terry Sullivan called Gacy “an
evil, vile and diabolical man, a sadistic animal.” Further, he called
Gacy, “a rat, mean, vile, base, and diabolical . . . the personification of
evil . . . insanely evil.” And then there was this exaggeration: “John
Gacy has accounted for more human devastation than many earthly
catastrophes.” It was one heck of a sideshow.

Dramatic in his own way, the five-foot-two Sam Amirante read pas¬
sages from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to support
his views. He stood straight and read clearly, “If I am the chief of sin¬
ners, then I am the chief of sufferers.” Then he pled with the jury, say¬
ing, “John Gacy is a madman who has been reaching out, saying, ‘Stop
me before I kill again.’” Imploring the jury to see the defense’s side of
the case, he beseeched them to return the verdict of not guilty by rea¬
son of insanity. He said Gacy should be studied to discover scientific
answers to the quandary that was his brain so that others might be pre¬
vented from committing such unfathomable violence.

On Wednesday, March 12, 1980, the jury moved behind closed
doors to decide the case. Within 120 minutes and after 108 witnesses

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial | 115

and testimony that lasted twenty-eight days, the twelve members met
and agreed unanimously to convict John Wayne Gacy of thirty-three
murders. In merely two hours, they emerged with their verdict written
on a piece of paper. In the courtroom, resounding applause and cheers
rang out from victims and their families. Gacy’s reaction to the jury’s
decision was not unexpected; the convicted murderer began to blame
others for his failure to win a life sentence because of insanity. He
blamed his lawyers; he blamed the jury; he blamed the government; he
blamed the whole judicial and political system.

It would do Gacy no good to blame, and his attempts at appeal
would go nowhere. For me, if there was blame to be cast, it had noth¬
ing to do with what went on within the trial itself. Though I had heard
it from Rignall and others before, after the trial it became clear: if the
police had done their job properly, many of the murders would not
have happened.

Jeff Rignall said the police were so uncooperative that he had to
help track down the killer himself, carefully looking for clues to his
identity, waiting interminably in a car with friends for Gacy’s car to
pass by. Police actually told Rignall to wait until Gacy was stopped for
some other offense; then they might look into his complaints. And
even when Gacy was finally apprehended for the brutal treatment of
Rignall, the state’s attorney decided against seeking a conviction. Rig¬
nall felt he was the victim of what was, at the time, an antihomosexual
police department, and I’m not so sure he was totally mistaken. Robert
Donnelly ran into a similar roadblock, and police preferred to believe
Gacy’s story that the torturous encounter was a sexual romp agreed
upon by both. John Syzc’s family was told their son, one of Gacy’s early
victims, was simply a runaway, and the case proceeded no further.
When confronted with a victim’s disappearance, police sometimes
wouldn’t even check to see if Gacy had any prior arrest record (like the
conviction and imprisonment in Iowa). All of this prompted victim
John Butkovich’s father to exclaim, “If the police had only paid atten¬
tion to us they might have saved many lives . . . they can’t put two and
two together.” Young John Butkovich was one of Gacy’s first victims,
and he was killed back in late July of 1975.

116 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

And the police? Their excuse was that they were burdened by too
many missing persons cases. Citing the statistic that in 1977 nearly
seven thousand missing Chicagoans were under the age of seventeen,
law enforcement seemed to say “Don’t blame me.” There was a con¬
tinuing and distinct danger in Chicago in 1980: if Chicago police
didn’t improve their computers and information systems, more serial
killers in the Chicago area would roam wild and unfettered. Those
who ran law enforcement in Chicago also needed to be far more re¬
ceptive to minorities and those with nonconventional lifestyles. Preju¬
dice and racism have no place in a police precinct or in a courtroom.

As I thought about the police, I later reviewed my transcripts of
conversations with Gacy. Strangely, Gacy had one more group he
needed to blame, those who were the most innocent, the victims.
“Look at Jeff Rignall’s book,” began Gacy, revving up. “He claims in
July he came back to my house with a friend of his in a van. He came
to the house and leaned against the railing. There is no railing. He
claims he rang the doorbell and waited for my mother to come to an¬
swer the door. There is no doorbell at my house.

“He says he was tied, that somebody was poking his zozo up his ass
while a blond-headed guy was giving him a blow job. I never got into
three-way sex. He also claims that he can identify me because I have
stretch marks. Why, I can show you right now. I don’t have no stretch
marks. Even when I was heavier, I didn’t have any stretch marks.”

His offer rankled me, and I quickly declined it.

But so it went, monotonously, illogically, as Gacy endlessly tried to
make himself out to be the one who was abused. He even planned to
write his own book, boldly called The Thirty-fourth Victim. John felt he
had an answer for everything. Often they were explanations that didn’t
make sense.

The day the trial ended, my husband and I went home to relax. I
put the world of lawyers and witnesses and the law itself out of my
mind. I dismissed the unprofessional manner of some of the witnesses
in the case, like Cavanaugh, who rudely had said I didn’t know what I
was talking about. That’s the way some of these guys are, but I resolved
never to be so undignified.

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

117

Later that evening, we went out and enjoyed dinner and a movie.
John Wayne Gacy, shackled yet defiant, turned to Illinois’s death row
as his new home, a not-so-welcoming place where he would exist, and
sometimes endure physical attacks, for many years.

It was an ugly, barren place. At the points where State Road 150 and
Kaskaskia Street intersect, the 125-year-old building was a combina¬
tion of federal and Greek Revival-style architecture, and it sat not far
from some railroad tracks, where weeds poked out from under the
gravel. Under clouds and in the heavy Illinois rain, the brown brick fa¬
cade with its forbidding four-pillar front looked something like the
gaping mouth of a haunted mansion. A few blocks away ran a partic¬
ularly dull stretch of the Mississippi River, a river that John Wayne
Gacy could not see. Inside the grim structure, Gacy (along with about
fifty others) waited for either an answer from the courts for his appeal
or a quick death by injection, a change from the electric chair to which
he was originally sentenced.

Most of the lawyers and psychiatrists ignored Gacy once there no
longer was a paycheck to be cashed. One or two of the doctors tried to
get more information from Gacy for their books, but they didn’t get
very far. Robert Egan, one of the prosecutors in the case, took a kind of
sideshow on the road, with slides and a black-humor-filled speech, to
titillate the cultlike fanatics who attended horror movie conventions.

For myself, I felt there was more to be gained medically and scien¬
tifically from a long-term study of Gacy, and I kept up a research rela¬
tionship that lasted for more than a decade. I asked John to begin
writing down his dreams, and his first note about his dreams read:

went to bed at 21:35. 01:53 woke up semi-wake urinated Dreaming
about time schedule woke up for breakfast

Dreaming about a parade through a cemetary with big bands and
colorful formation just so these two rich people would get married
kinda like boy meets girl

The people at the wedding and the funeral were people I knew
from garamar school and high school.

118 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

It seems that I was bringing them all together. The parade was through
big beautiful garden all neet and shaped perfect. With alot of musical
background.

Despite Gacy’s ragtag note, the content of which really didn’t mean
anything when I didn’t have other dreams to compare it with, I believed
a diary of dreams might lead to more clues about his condition. I urged
him to send more dream journals through the mail, but he never did.
Maybe the things he did remember were too horrible to write down.
Maybe he was just lazy. Over the years, he did, however, send volumes
of letters, mostly carefully typewritten and often double spaced.

Perhaps to compensate for the rape and rope-filled horrors he for¬
got or could not remember, Gacy paid obsessive attention to detail in
these notes. In June 1983, he wrote to me, saying,

During the month of May, I received 143 pieces of mail, and sent out
59 pieces. During 1982,1 received 1167 pieces . . . out of 8,760 hours
in the year (1982) I was out of my cell 2,274 hours and 20 minutes.

I sent out 568 pieces of mail, took 353 showers, blood pressure taken
16 times, and out of 1095 meals served, I ate 463 . . . Today marks
the 39th month here.

Like Richard Macek, he took to the organization required by his
jailers, and his work as a contractor came in handy.

I have been busy with plastering and painting. They changed the vis¬
iting area, and I was going to do the remodeling, but after thinking
about it, told them that they would have to do it by there other crew.

See I don’t mine doing work for them, but building security areas is
not in keeping with the inmate code, and I would only have problems
with it. . . After they built it I took over and did the taping and plas¬
tering, now all I got is the painting to do.

Gacy convinced the authorities to paint it sky blue.

Shortly after he was sentenced to death row, John Gacy began to

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

119

paint on canvas. They generally were of clowns like Pogo, the scary en¬
tertainer with a frightening, distorted mouth Gacy became when, as a
free man, he mugged and joked for children. Additionally, he drew the
thorn-crowned head of Jesus Christ, the occasional landscape, and the
Seven Dwarfs, which the Walt Disney company immediately asked
him to cease doing. He did indeed listen and stopped painting versions
of the artwork called Hi-ho, Hi-ho. He sent to me country and rural
scenes, which I hung in my office. In two years, he had painted over
250 works and earned nearly $10,000 selling them. During this time,
a government worker caused quite a stir by purchasing one of Gacy’s
works, especially when it was discovered that the employee who made
the purchase was Mars Kennedy, the governors photographer. Gover¬
nor James Thompson tried to order John’s drawings removed from the
Illinois State Fair, where a 500-piece display of inmate art was featured,
but his decree came too late: all of John’s six paintings sold quickly.

I wasn’t interested in whether they sold or not, nor was I interested
in the reason Gacy painted them (which he said was out of boredom,
not out of an artistic sensibility). When I looked closely at the amateur
paintings Gacy sent to me, I was completely intrigued by what they
seemed to say about his internal state. In a letter to John on January
18, 1984, I wrote, “Although you can see something in real life, what
you paint seems to come from inside and some of the depression and
despair as well as the anger [you feel] comes through in the painting.”
For me, the comment was like a move on a chessboard. I wanted to see
if Gacy would object or even deny my suggestions of depression, de¬
spair, and anger. Instead, he just ignored the words in his reply.

Gacy’s painting of a lake and mountain landscape looked like some¬
thing between unschooled folk art and near photo-realism. In the fore¬
front, the lake and evergreens first appeared primitive. And the
snowcapped mountain in the background seemed somehow hyperreal.
On closer examination, however, many evergreen trees were colored
wrong in orange and yellows and reds, as though they were deciduous
trees in the fall, and their branches pointed erectly upward, as though
they were made of iron and the sky were magnetic. The painting
showed that Gacy perceived the world much differently than most

120 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

other painters, schooled or unschooled. Looking closer still, I noticed
that the shadows are backward, opposite to where the sun would cast
them. It was just like Gacy the person. On first glance, the person
seemed fine, nice, almost cheery. But peering at the inside, into the
grim underbelly, he was all off-kilter.

During his time on death row, Gacy became known as “Boss
Hogg,” after the moonshining, politically corrupt banker police com¬
missioner on the Dukes ofHazzard comedy show. Outwardly, it was a
perfect sobriquet for the jowly Gacy, who, like the TV show character,
smoked as many as fifteen cigars a day and was exceedingly portly.
Which is not to say his demeanor appealed to most of the prison pop¬
ulation. Gacy wrote to me, saying,

Last week I came on one guy in the library, who wanted me to go into
the back room to talk with him, with four more backing him up.
Now, I informed the captain ahead of him, that I had been threaten
by this individual, but they just say to go in and kick his ass. . . . While
I am not afraid of him, I am afraid of myself. I don’t believe in fight¬
ing, never have, but if I have to set an example, then someone will get
killed. I told [the guy] which side of me does he want to talk too, and
which side of me does he want to fight with. He didn’t answer, just
walked away. But sooner or later that’s not going to work. I am afraid
I am going to hurt someone. Because once it starts, I will have no con¬
trol over it.

There was no doubt in my mind that Gacy would never have
started something. He was able to respond positively to externals in
prison like the guards and the rules, and he was glad to sublimate his
impulses, the thoughts or triggers that would induce him to anger and
kill. In prison, he knew what his boundaries were, and he adhered to
them without fail. Again, it’s worth noting that his adherence to prison
rules is not evidence that Gacy was sane. He simply had no access to
potential victims, to his black Oldsmobile, to Bughouse Square, or to
any of the familiar things that may have helped to trigger his attacks.
And even if he did want to kill, he didn’t have the tools—no rope, no

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

121

way to drug his victims. He was prison-rule-bound, and that was a
good thing.

Occasionally, Gacy was attacked by inmates during scuffles in
which he’d be, say, stabbed by a prisoner wielding a sharpened pencil.
Gacy wrote to me, complaining, “It got me in the left arm and went
in about an inch and a half. I lost a lot of blood, but they replaced it
in the hospital. . . . While I am not mad, which I don’t understand, I
think that he is an animal.” Gacy also felt that the prisoner wanted
publicity, saying, “I guess he thinks he can get it with me.” He was
probably right; anyone who attacked Gacy would be looked upon as a
hero within the prison. And in this way with a combination of fear,
hypochondria, and monotony, the years passed for John Gacy.

Outside, as the clock ticked toward midnight on May 9, 1994, a crowd
of hundreds waited. Some prayed reverently while others drank and
partied as though they were at a rock concert. Inside, a prison worker
took six straps to secure the country’s (and arguably the world’s) most
notorious serial killer to a gurney. Grumbling family members of the
victims were forced into a basement room, not to view the execution
but to watch the news carried live on a local TV station—as if they
hadn’t had enough of that. John Wayne Gacy had consumed a meal of
fried chicken, shrimp, and strawberries that cost taxpayers about eigh¬
teen dollars. On the day before, he was surrounded by his family. Even
the two children by his first wife, Marlynn, came to speak to him one
last time. Having said his farewells, Gacy was a motormouth to the
very end, chiding the warden in the death chamber. “Taking my life
won’t compensate for the lives of others. This is only a state murder.”
It was almost as if he hadn’t been able to make the connection between
his murders and his punishment.

Two needles were placed into his arm (an extra needle in case the
first didn’t work). A team of prison personnel (licensed doctors are not
allowed to do this) monitored Gacy’s heart. Just as a slow saline drip
began to flow intravenously into his arm, a curtain rose and the wit¬
nesses were revealed in an adjoining room. Into his right arm, a dou¬
ble dose of the anesthetic sodium pentothal put John Wayne Gacy to

122 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

sleep in a matter of moments. Briefly, he strained, moaned, gasped. His
hands, tightened into pudgy fists, went limp. Pancuronium bromide
made his muscles stiff, and as his breathing ceased, potassium chloride
halted the murderer’s heart. Death had long stalked Gacy and finally
won, with some help from the anesthetic overdose and the respiratory
and cardiac arrest, which occurred while Gacy was asleep. Almost three
dozen witnesses began talking in hushed tones as they saw Gacy in his
dead pallor.

Gacy was gone. No more would he torture, no more would he rape
and kill, no more would he choke or drown his victims. And though I
had known him for more than a dozen years, I had no remorse about
his passing. As a doctor, if you carry around every individual you have
ever worked with, you can’t function. It’s not easy to learn, but you
begin to address learning objectivity early in medical school. You learn
to work through it. Some doctors react by becoming very cold, think¬
ing, This case is done and over and I don’t have to deal with this case
anymore. Others react by becoming so enmeshed that they lose all ob¬
jectivity, all capacity to consider the problem before them. I certainly
addressed those issues in great depth when I worked in pediatric on¬
cology with children who were being treated for terminal cancer. I be¬
came objective enough to work caringly with families and to help them
say good-bye. And then I was able to leave it. I did cry a lot at times,
letting myself feel the emotions. But I could let it go. Gacy was no in¬
nocent child. I collected data for over fourteen years, yes. But I had no
friendship with, or even fondness for, Gacy the person.

John Wayne Gacy, who’d lingered on death row for well over a decade,
was pronounced dead at 12:58 A.M. I turned off the news on the tele¬
vision set at the Holiday Inn on Larkin Avenue in Joliet, Illinois, to
which I had driven silently on back roads at night to avoid the media.
As I flicked around to find some music on the radio, I thought what
an almost fantastic experience this was; the fourteen-year journey of
following Gacy had been almost otherworldly. (There had been one
last chance that the governor would change Gacy’s sentence to life in
prison, but this was not to be the case.) Inside the hotel room, the min-

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial

123

utes seemed to pass unnecessarily slowly as I waited alone. To pass the
time, I tried to study for a tort law exam I would have in a few hours.
At 3 A.M., the phone rang and I took the elevator downstairs, oblivi¬
ous to the sappy music within, oblivious to the people in the lobby, ex¬
cept for the doors through which I walked. Outside, I waited briefly
until a car picked me up. Nothing was said during the short trip to Sil¬
ver Cross Hospital. All I could hear was the constant hum of the car
engine in the soundless blandness of the middle of the night.

At 3:21 A.M., I found myself in the autopsy suite. It had been
arranged through Gacy’s family that I assist in the autopsy. The body
had been moved after being lifted into a van. But the van was being
tailed, perhaps by the media. The body then had to be surreptitiously
loaded into another vehicle in order to ditch the ghouls who often give
a bad name to their profession.

In addition to the pathologist (also called a prosector) who would
perform the procedure, a policeman, big and burly, stood nearby, out
of the way and silent. A police officer rarely attends the autopsy of a
former prisoner, but because of Gacy’s notoriety and the media atten¬
tion it garnered, I realized that having him there was probably neces¬
sary—as long as he didn’t disturb our work.

The blue-tinged body of Gacy was removed from the van and
placed upon an aluminum table. The table itself was more than func¬
tional. Plumbed with faucets, spigots, and drains, it was designed with
high edges and was slanted. All these prevented Gacy’s blood from run¬
ning onto the floor. First, the body’s trunk was opened and the inter¬
nal organs were removed, measured, and labeled. There was no talking
during the procedure, and no music playing, as there sometimes is
within an operating room. Flesh is sometimes said to have the odor of
lamb, but we were so focused on what we were doing (and there was
so much to do) that the only sense we had was one that commanded
“Complete the work as carefully and as orderly as possible.”

As I assisted, the pathologist carefully opened Gacy’s cranium with
an electric Stryker saw and removed the calvarium (top of the skull).
There, then, was his gray matter, the 1,300-gram organ that caused
such misery and grief for so many.

124 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

I was very excited to begin the search for what may have caused him
to exist in his persecutory, murderous netherworld. After connections
to the spinal cord and various membranes (dural reflections) were eas¬
ily severed, the brain, soft, was removed with a kind of a “swoosh”
sound. It was placed into a glass jar fdled with formalyn, a mixture of
formaldehyde gas and buffered water. The solution does two things: it
prevents decay and also thickens the matter so that it can be handled
without breaking up. Not unexpectedly, I observed no abnormalities in
the brain after a cursory examination that night. And so, just as his
body was readied for a funeral, John Gacy’s brain would be readied for
study—cut into sections and placed on microscopic slides. As the dark
sky began to brighten over Joliet and the damp, misty halos left the
streetlights, I got into my car and returned home with Gacy’s brain in
tow, hoping my next task wouldn’t be as complicated as I imagined it
would be.

I considered which neuropathologist could perform the appropri¬
ate tests on John Gacy’s brain, but this was no easy task. Because of the
media attention surrounding the case, most of which was more sub¬
jective than objective, most of the qualified doctors I knew wanted
nothing to do with the serial murderer, even though he was now dead.
Physicians often want to uphold an appearance of propriety, which is
an adjunct of the oath we take, and no one wanted the label of “mad
scientist,” which would have been like branding them with a scarlet
letter—even if the resultant research would discover something impor¬
tant. Beyond this, if the neuropathologist was connected with an aca¬
demic institution, the danger of helping in the research could have a
wider effect by entailing the risk of losing millions of dollars in en¬
dowments. After many phone calls, I was able to find the pathologist
who would agree to do the tests, but only after the constantly reiter¬
ated promise of anonymity. There was one more stipulation. Gacy’s
name would never appear with the sections of the brain that were sent
away for study. Instead, on the brown box and the glass jar inside was
a simple number, a code that only we would know.

Weeks later, the Federal Express envelope arrived at my office, and
I looked at it with real anticipation. Was there really something there,

Taking the Stand at the Gacy Trial | 125

something that would begin to help me understand Gacy’s actions?
Was there a kind of tumor, or would some minor microscopic aberra¬
tion be found? I ripped open the tab on the envelope and looked at the
documents within.

Ultimately, the report I’d waited so anxiously for found nothing ab¬
normal with Gacy’s brain. But as the anonymous pathologist had
agreed with me, “There’s no replacement for the study of a person, one
who is alive, in different situations with different stimuli.” A dead
organ is almost like a piece of steak that was once a cow; it doesn’t
allow you to penetrate the living functions of the organism. I’d hit a
dead end.

In reality, there is no current body of scientific research or psychi¬
atric literature that truly explains the exact nature of the serial mur¬
derer. I expected that nothing would change this, not any time soon.
Unlike other diseases, no one, not the state or federal government, not
a private national or international institution, would set aside the
funds for serious discovery. Even if they did, the law would not allow
anyone to examine a serial killer properly and extensively while he was
still alive.

And yet through this quagmire, which grew deeper and deeper, I
had hope, hope that things would change. In fact, it was even more
than a hope; it was an expectation.

EIGHT

THE YORKSHIRE RippER
AND WAYNE WILLIAMS

A fter ten years of research and investigation, I felt I’d barely
scratched the surface of what goes on inside the head of a serial
killer. I had collected volumes of data and had begun to theorize, but
the theories led to more questions than answers. I knew a little, and
while that was more than anyone else, I still needed to know a lot
more. So when the British magazine She contacted me in May 1980
about my thoughts regarding the Yorkshire Ripper, I agreed to talk.
The hunt for him was the biggest manhunt in the country’s history, be¬
ginning in late 1975. From the serious to the silly, the public reaction
to the Ripper ran the gamut. Concerned women by the hundreds took
to the streets to protest movies that portrayed violence against women,
believing that these portrayals led men to kill. Meanwhile, badges bear¬
ing the phrase LEEDS UNITED—MORE FEARED THAN THE YORKSHIRE
RIPPER were hawked outside of Leeds United Stadium. The British
writer from She was herself full of fear, having once been beaten dur¬
ing an attack near Bergdorf Goodman in midtown Manhattan. Instead
of playing the fear factor to sell magazines (which is what many of the
daily tabloids had done), the writer said She wanted something that
told the populace how to better protect itself from serial killers.

128 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

While no one is ever safe from a determined serial murderer be¬
cause his violent determination is anything but human, some believe
there are ways to reduce the odds of attack and/or abduction. While no
one knows exactly what makes a person become a victim, people can
reduce their chances of capture. One might avoid a serial killer by
being wary and watchful of his or her surroundings—by being alert
but not alarmed. It sounds like common sense, but some don’t know
that it’s more dangerous to take a shortcut through a deserted park at
night than during the day. So the alert person wouldn’t take that walk
through the park at night alone. And a confident demeanor, including
a brisk, confident stride, couldn’t hurt either. As I told She, if you walk
into a party, you can almost immediately tell who the life of the party
is. Similarly, a serial murderer can tell who is or isn’t vulnerable or ap¬
proachable. If you are actually confronted by a serial murderer, some
say hysterical resistance and screaming can help, if the murderer doesn’t
incapacitate you before you can fight back. But what happens when
the serial killer, the one who has a dominant, aggressive personality, is
actually encouraged by distress or screams? It’s been said that in such a
case, a polite, quiet approach might save the victim. If, however, the se¬
rial murderer is himself reserved and tentative in his approach, fight¬
ing back and yelling may indeed work. All this is a little bit like the
advice given regarding rape prevention. They used to say, if you’re
going to get attacked, don’t fight back. And now they tell you to fight
back. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to get killed one way or the
other. Whatever the rape victim does may or may not work. And the
same applies to victims of serial murderers.

Although Jeff Rignall was passive with John Gacy, he was seriously
injured. But he did escape with his life, a life that he would try to mend
over time. Rignall guessed that he wasn’t killed because he meekly went
along with Gacy’s torturous experiments; indeed, Rignall didn’t know
exactly why he was freed. More important, John Gacy didn’t know ei¬
ther. My guess is that the sparing of Jeff’s life had more to do with
Gacy than it had to do with Rignall. Was there some kind of a dis¬
traction going on in Gacy’s brain that prevented Jeff from being the
major focus of what Gacy was doing? If Gacy was singularly involved

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams

129

with his victim, the serial murderer would just proceed, as if following
steps 1, 2, 3, and 4 in a cookbook recipe. The distraction could have
been something simple. Gacy could have gotten bored with his victim
or he could have become tired physically. But it was not something
Rignall did that made this occur. Rignall’s passivity did not allow a dis¬
traction to occur; it couldn’t have. It was purely something deep within
Gacy himself. If we follow the cookbook analogy, Rignall was like food
to Gacy. Sometimes a serial killer snacks; sometimes he feasts. With
Rignall, Gacy snacked.

In these strange relationships between victim and serial killer,
there’s an underlying, preconscious clue that comes from the victim.
To a serial killer, this clue is like a flashing sign saying he or she is avail¬
able. That beacon may be something as innocent as the victims will¬
ingness to talk to a serial killer. I’m not talking about small gestures or
subtle movements or anything that has to do with body language. Ul¬
timately, there’s no personality type that’s consistent in victims. The
shy, the meek, the assertive, the brash, and everyone in between can be
victims. The answer lies more in what the serial killer is looking for in
a victim, and we can’t yet identify or define what that is. Some re¬
searchers will say it must be something in the pheromones, the chem¬
ical that also inspires people to get acquainted in a love-at-first-sight
kind of way. I believe that the initial interaction between serial mur¬
derer and victim is as unpredictable as, though similar to, the chem¬
istry that occurs when people meet and become attracted to one
another. One has to do with love at first sight and falling in love. The
other has to do with something I call “falling in death.” Serial murder
at first sight exists and thrives much like love at first sight. No one
knows exactly what it is and how it works, but it hits quickly and, as
we’ve seen, usually with tragic results.

I explained all of this to the writer, but after the August 1980 issue
of She appeared on the newsstands, I was disappointed with what I
read. The story was a puff piece, a sensationalized take that seemed
more scary than helpful. I should’ve known better.

Nevertheless, once the article was published, I was contacted by a
member of the special British task force from Scotland Yard who was

130 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

involved in the Yorkshire Ripper case. In essence, what he wanted was
no different from what police search for here in the United States.
Most law enforcement people want a definite answer to their problems
immediately, and this official was no different.

“Can you tell me exactly the kind of person who did this, Dr. Mor¬
rison?” asked the person on the other end of the line.

“No, I’m sorry, I really can’t give specific answers. You’re there and
I’m here.”

“Are you sure you can’t tell us anything more?”

“No. No, I can’t unless I am there and I have done my work.” I am
not able to give detailed, specific answers until I’m close to the crime
and the facts and have analyzed them. It is not professional to make
such predictions, and I don’t do it. But police don’t want speculation.
They don’t want “It may be”; they want someone to say, “This is it and
go get him.” I’m sure they were happy when psychics they hired came
in with “definitive answers,” even though the psychics were eventually
proven wrong. Still, I became intrigued by the Ripper case and studied
it closely because most people believed at the time that serial murders
could happen only in the United States.

In the late 1970s, the almost rural town of Bingley, England, was
nothing much to brag about. Set in a valley about two hundred miles
north of London and about seven miles from Leeds, the place has a his¬
tory that dates back to the Druids. In the 1970s, the primary diversion
for many men in the town was going to pubs for entertainment, sober¬
ing up, and then . . . going straight to the pubs for entertainment
again. So it was for John Sutcliffe, a World War II veteran who never
saw frontline action (or any battle at all) but entertained the troops
with his talent for singing. While John enjoyed hanging out in the
local pubs and playing cricket, he also struck fear into the minds of his
children when he returned home and fell into frequent rages.

Peter Sutcliffe, John’s first child, was dubbed a “weakling” by his fa¬
ther. It wasn’t so much of an insult as something that smacked of ab¬
solute truth. The five-pound baby was thin-legged and runty, and he
took longer than most babies do to begin to walk. As he grew to be a
boy, he was still small, silent, almost like a hermit. When John bought

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams

131

his young son a soccer ball and a new uniform, he had to coax and ca¬
jole Peter into playing. While he surprisingly kicked the ball around
with aplomb like he was born for the sport, Peter played only that one
time with his father, relegating the ball and uniform to collect dust in
the closet. Once he was so bullied by young school thugs that when he
was supposed to be at school every day he hid instead in his family’s at¬
ticlike loft space, which he entered through a trapdoor. There he lolled
for two weeks, daydreaming and listening to the sounds of the outside
world, until the school authorities sent a letter to his parents, wonder¬
ing why he had missed his classes.

In Bingley, the people that Peter knew best were those like his
brother Mick, hard-drinking toughs, macho boys and men who pre¬
ferred their fists or brass knuckles over talking to settle a dispute and
preferred to berate women rather than come to their defense. The
close-knit but troubled Sutcliffe family wasn’t immune to the culture
and the general tenor of the town, and Peter’s rough-and-tumble
brothers Mick and Carl were always in and out of trouble. Mick was
once jailed for three months for punching a police sergeant. All three
boys in the family seemed to be happy to steal things now and then,
everything from jewelry to hubcaps. Carl, Peter’s underemployed
younger brother, once decided to live in the woods in the winter, tak¬
ing only his sleeping bag, his motorcycle, and a gun. To say the least,
these folks were not considered to be pillars of the community.

Peter adamantly fought against his weakling image, staying for
hours in his room, bulking himself up with a Bullworker isometric
muscle-building contraption, enough so that he could take the strenu¬
ous job of gravedigger. But soon, the repressed, shy, and mysterious
young adult who never seemed to show much emotion began to rob
the dead bodies of any jewelry with which they were buried. It was at
work, around the age of eighteen in 1964, that Peter, for no apparent
reason, swung a mallet at a coworker, who was much older than he
was. The blow landed squarely on the old man’s head, but the seasoned
tough pressed no charges. Like other serial murderers, Sutcliffe began
his experimentation with aggression while he was still in his teens.
When I heard of this first incident, one that is usually ignored in any-

132 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

thing written about him, I felt this was the first moment when Sutcliffe
learned a unique behavioral mode: the thrill of hitting someone with a
mallet. In my mind, it was the beginning of aggressive behavior that
would escalate.

Whenever he drank too much, Peter would indeed open up, only
to collapse in fits of hooting laughter, incessant giggling, that often
went on for up to ten minutes. Once he got started, he couldn’t stop.
Often he appeared frightened for no reason, and his eyes darted about
the room; he rarely looked anyone directly in the eye.

Peter tried hard to cultivate a look that was somewhere between a
1960s and a 1970s rock star. Dark and grim, he carefully trimmed his
hair and beard for hours on end in the bathroom and wore a black
leather jacket and black Cuban-heeled boots. To me, this was another
small clue to his murderous future. Serial murderers are always ex¬
tremely well put together, whether they have a lot of money or not.
They’re well groomed and are never dirty. They’re highly presentable
individuals who take care of themselves. When looked at together
along with a number of other signs, the pieces of the puzzle begin to
form a detailed picture of the serial killer.

Obsessed with engines and motorcycles, Peter liked to tinker with
engines, doing tune-ups for hours on end, even when an engine was
brand-new. When he looked in the mirror now, he was proud of what
he saw. Beginning to like his body, he showed off his newly created
muscles by walking up and down the stairs of the Sutcliffe family
home—on his hands. But he seemed to hold emotions inside during
stressful moments until he would sometimes explode with rage. He
once punched one of the toughs that was teasing him with such force
that the burly man literally went flying like something out of an
Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and Peter broke his wrist. Here was yet
another possible clue. Serial killers rarely can control the intensity of
their impulses. When they go to do something, they don’t modulate
their reactions. It’s all or nothing, broken wrist or not.

Despite these outbursts and his silent manner, Peter was the fa¬
vorite of the Sutcliffe progeny, and he often dropped whatever he was
doing to help his family. Even his father came to like him. At a local

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams

133

pub called the Royal Standard, the Sutcliffe brothers’ haunt, Peter fell
for an odd Czech woman, who, like him, was the wallflower type. Un¬
like him, she was very demanding, and Peters family found her diffi¬
cult to get along with. Together in the bar, Peter and Sonia would sit
away from their friends, talking and laughing for hours. Sonia was an
eminently troubled woman who, not long after meeting Peter, had a
breakdown. Sonia claimed to be the second coming of Christ and said
she saw her hands bleed with stigmata, the wounds of the passion of
Christ. Sonia was immediately diagnosed with schizophrenia, much to
Peter’s dismay. But Peter made it his mission to be there constantly for
her (with the help of her parents) once she was out of the hospital. This
is not to say that Peter cared desperately for Sonia the way Romeo
cared for Juliet. Neither serial killers nor psychotics have strong at¬
tachments to their spouses. He was merely fulfilling a role he felt he
was expected to play, one that he had seen others play. Eventually they
would marry.

Through all this, Peter himself was changing, and the transforma¬
tion went beyond feeling his oats. With a friend or two, he took to tak¬
ing trips through the various nearby towns—to the local red-light
districts. On one night, he gathered up enough courage to approach a
woman. But it didn’t go well. The first time he asked a woman if she
was “doing business,” he got ripped off, and the woman absconded
with ten pounds. It was a lesson he would not forget. As he walked
back to his friends, Peter felt mortified and completely embarrassed.
He even felt vengeful.

Not long afterward, at a restaurant on St. Paul’s Road near Man-
ningham Park, an area populated by prostitutes, Peter unexpectedly
stopped eating his dinner of fish and chips. With a suddenness that
was unusual even to his pals, he got up from the table and quickly left
the place. He searched the dark streets, and within minutes found what
he wanted. He looked around and placed a shard of brick into a sock,
and he approached a woman he called an “old cow.” Wielding the
rock-filled sock as a weapon, Peter hit her on the head. Though the po¬
lice went after Sutcliffe within twenty-four hours, the woman decided
against pressing charges.

134 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Not only had Peter begun to rage against women, but he also began
to have “company” during his work at the graveyard. Peter didn’t tell
anyone, but while digging graves, he heard a voice, a compelling, hum¬
bling voice that thundered in his head, echoing loudly. After looking
around to find its source, he climbed from the grave he was digging.
He felt haunted, saying that the ground rose up, creating a slope that
was difficult to negotiate. The voice led him to walk near to, then over
to, the slightly overgrown plot of a long-dead Polish man. Peter stared
for a long time at the large crucifix on the headstone. And he heard the
voice again. He looked slowly around to see who was nearby, but he
saw no one. The voice emanated from the headstone, still echoing, the
words somehow fused together as one. Yet Peter was able to understand
perfectly. The words commanded Peter. For him, it was probably as
profound as Moses’ experience at the burning bush. But Peter Sutcliffe
was no prophet.

“I felt it was very wonderful at the time,” explained Sutcliffe later.
“I heard what I believed then and believe now to be God’s voice.

“It was starting to rain. I remember going to the top of a slope over¬
looking the valley and I felt as though I had just experienced some¬
thing fantastic. I looked across the valley and all around and thought
of heaven and earth and how insignificant we all were. But I felt so im¬
portant at the moment.” If you look at history, Peter Sutcliffe wasn’t
the only serial murder who said he heard religious voices. Jeffrey Dah-
mer, who had sex with his dead victims and who ate parts of their bod¬
ies, built a kind of altar to both God and Satan in his apartment. It was
a gruesome sanctum that included skulls of his victims in which he
would burn incense so that he might absorb “special powers and ener¬
gies.” Joseph Kallinger, who in addition to committing other murders
also drowned his son Joey with the aid of another son, Mike, stated
that he was also on a divine mission from God. When these killers hear
voices from God, what they’re really hearing is only their own inner
voice, imagined permutations of what’s in their own minds. They may
want to have someone else to blame for their inhuman deeds or they
may want to feel more important than they really are, as if they are an¬
gels of God sent to earth to scrub it clean from its immoral filth.

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams | 135

In the case of Sutcliffe, the comments that he saw “how insignifi¬
cant we all were” and that “I felt so important at the moment” make
me think once again that, like other serial killers, he was emotionally a
very young child. Who, other than an infant, feels like he is control¬
ling not just the world, but the universe around him? Who else but an
infant feels so important that he thinks he is the center of the universe?
And who else but a child would think in this way for no particular rea¬
son, not for wealth, not for power, not for human domination, but just
to maintain and protect his own personal cosmos?

Sutcliffe indeed felt he had been chosen. As the months began to
pass, the voice, which had been initially comforting, suggested to Peter
that he become violent. After the encounter with the absconding pros¬
titute, Peter believed the voice of God had said to him, “It was the
prostitutes who were responsible for all of these problems.”

“It kept saying that I had to go on a mission ... to remove the pros¬
titutes. To get rid of them.”

Unbeknownst to his family and even his wife (who was by now on
medication and feeling much healthier), Sutcliffe embarked upon his
“mission” against women with a passionate zeal. His MO was some¬
what unusual: he skulked up behind many of his victims and whacked
them repeatedly with a common ball-peen hammer or a claw hammer,
until their skulls were cracked. He also carefully sharpened a screw¬
driver to a point and used that to stab his victims, along with various
kitchen knives. With these, he would rip and slash the bodies of his
victims until they breathed no more. Sometimes he stabbed the
women in an eye, sometimes he stabbed repeatedly, so much so that
one woman suffered fifty-two stab wounds. Sometimes the five-foot-
seven Sutcliffe kicked and stomped upon them so hard with his size 7
Dunlop Warwick Wellington boots that the imprint remained on the
body of his victims. Primarily, though, he hit them with hammers.

When Sutcliffe was compelled to kill, it was indeed first to kill pros¬
titutes. He prowled around the red-light districts, and when he had
that urge, nothing would stop him, not even celebrations with the
family. But it wasn’t only prostitutes whom Peter approached. Something
in his head told him that any woman he had a desire to attack or kill

136 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

was a prostitute. With his hammer, he struck Dr. Upadhya Bandara,
who was in from Singapore on a scholarship from the World Health
Organization. He killed Barbara Leach, a young student who attended
the University of Bradford at the time. And he also struck sixteen-year-
old Jayne MacDonald, a Grandways grocery store clerk.

Through all this Sutcliffe played the role of caring son and doting
husband. But he also liked to venture somewhere that had nothing to
do with pubs or the red-light districts. Sutcliffe found he was fasci¬
nated by a waxworks. He would go to a run-down museum at the
working-class Morecambe resort, an hour and a half west of Bingley on
the pretty Lancashire coast. Once in the museum, he didn’t care so
much for the impressive figures of Princess Margaret, Joseph Stalin, or
Johnny Ray. Instead he spent time in the Chamber of Horrors, which
featured the likes of Jack the Ripper and other murderous criminals of
English history. He didn’t mind the moldy smell of the place or the
rain that dripped from the ceiling. Peter didn’t notice because he was
mesmerized.

Sutcliffe was also enthralled by another exhibit called “The Mu¬
seum of Anatomy”—especially “The Macabre Torso Room,” which
was dimly lit and constructed in gruesome detail. Here he carefully
viewed cut-up, limbless, headless women. Further on was a display of
the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases, sculptures of diseased gen¬
italia. Did looking at the bodies in wax drive him to do anything? No.
Was he able to say, these prostitutes make these people have venereal
diseases, even if they’re in wax? Did he then say, therefore, I’m going to
cleanse the world? No. It was just a morbid fascination, an extension
of his ever-broadening experiment into killing others.

As the days passed into months and years, the public demanded an¬
swers, and the murders he committed led to the largest manhunt
Britain had ever witnessed. As British writer Gordon Burn wrote in
Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (one of the very few good books
written about serial killers), 150,000 people were talked to by the po¬
lice by mid-1979. That included 27,000 searches of houses and 22,000
statements taken by the authorities. There were 17,000 possible sus¬
pects in the morass that was the case of the Yorkshire Ripper. Police

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams

137

had spoken to Sutcliffe himself eight times, but they never went fur¬
ther than asking a few questions. Sadly, the Brits were thrown off by a
tape recording (sent to police) that claimed to be the Ripper. As the
tape’s sprockets turned and turned and the police listened and listened
again, one of the heads of the investigation, assistant chief constable
George Oldfield, felt he was right to eliminate any suspects who didn’t
have the Geordie accent. Geordie is common in the North East of
England, sometimes mistaken for an Irish or even a Scottish accent.
Some linguists estimate that accents in England change after just a dis¬
tance of two or three miles. So Sutcliffe from Bingley sounded com¬
pletely different, with his Yorkshire accent, which contained sounds
much softer, like animator Nick Park’s characters Wallace and Gromit.
Because of the tape, some began to believe that there was more than
one Ripper, a copycat killer.

That idea seems to be very common in serial murder cases. The cry
is “only one person could not do something so horrible. There must be
others.” This concept is especially prevalent when people have in their
minds the belief that murderers always kill in the same way. But one of
the things we know about serial killers is they don’t kill the same way
every time. The victims indeed may be similar, but the way of killing
varies somewhat, since serial murderers like to experiment. However,
the horror of the killings does provide some interesting theories. In
fact, there’s one gentleman who lives in Ireland who thinks of it as his
life’s work to promote his theory of a second Yorkshire Ripper. The
killings stopped when Sutcliffe was apprehended. That was the end of
the story.

But it wasn’t easy to get him. The authorities were so flummoxed
by the Ripper’s crimes that they resorted to just about anything, in¬
cluding the faulty psychics, to solve the case. Police had indeed come
close. When Peter Sutcliffe got Jean Jordan to agree to sex for a five-
pound note, he attacked her near a cemetery overgrown with weeds,
debris, and hawthorn bushes. Jordan was hit with a hammer eleven
times until her moaning led to the silence that comes with severe in¬
jury. When he saw the headlights of a nearby vehicle, Sutcliffe left hur¬
riedly, fearing discovery. Later, he recalled forgetting the brand-new

138 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

five-pound note, serial number AW51 121565, somewhere near Jor¬
dan’s body. Returning to the secluded scene of the crime, he found
nothing. In anger and frustration, he took a broken windowpane and
began slashing at the body. When her stomach blew open with the
odor of death, he vomited. Even more angered, he decided to remove
her head with a hacksaw to throw the police, who were used to his
Ripper methodology, off the trail. Exhausted, he could not complete
the arduous task. Eventually the police found the five-pound note in
Jean Jordan’s purse and traced it to a bundle of cash that had been dis¬
tributed to twenty-three companies. During their 8,000 interviews,
police did indeed speak to Peter, but they determined that nothing
was amiss.

If Peter had no guilt about his crimes, one of the pals who accom¬
panied him to Yorkshire’s red-light districts did. After thinking and
worrying about it for some time, Trevor Birdsall, one of Peter’s few
friends, suspected that Sutcliffe was the Yorkshire Ripper; Birdsall went
to the police in person to report his story. He said that after one of
Peter’s first encounters with a prostitute, Peter confessed to Trevor that
he had hit a woman with a rock contained in a sock. Peter didn’t say
she was a prostitute, calling her an “old cow” instead. Birdsall admit¬
ted that he saw the rock along with the bloody sock. Authorities never
followed up on the tip.

On January 2, 1981, two South Yorkshire policemen chanced upon
a suspicious-looking car parked in a driveway off a seemingly private
road. Sutcliffe was inside with a prostitute, about to have his murder¬
ous way with her. Sergeant Bob Ring and Probationary Constable
Robert Hydes walked over to the car and talked to Sutcliffe. As they
checked on his strange license plates, which were badly taped over the
real plates, Sutcliffe said he had to pee. Off by himself, he tossed his
killing tools onto a pile of leaves. When he returned, the police took
him into custody, since the license plates that were attached by tape
were stolen from another vehicle. It took Sutcliffe sixteen hours to
spew a detailed confession, sixteen hours during which he was de¬
scribed as being relaxed and almost serene.

When his lawyer asked him to take the stand in his own defense,

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams

139

Peter often used the “voices from God” excuse. There is no doubt that
Peter Sutcliffe used the idea of commandments from God just to kill
people.

At one point, Peter told the jury he once stopped himself from
killing. But no serial killer I have known talks about summoning the
strength to be able to halt his urges. He just stops, without thought or
consideration. It’s a very unusual statement that implies the person was
in complete control of what he was doing. It goes completely against
that statement that “God was telling me to do this.” Why did he go
against God during this one time? And why did God tell him to kill
women who weren’t prostitutes? Suffice to say that in May 1981, the
jury convicted Peter Sutcliffe of thirteen counts of murder and he was
placed in Parkhurst prison. But a new mental health law was written
in England in 1983. Under it, Sutcliffe was considered medically in¬
sane and was moved to Broadmoor Hospital in the spring of 1984. He
is held there to this day.

By the time Sutcliffe was convicted in 1981, a series of murders deep
in the South began to receive a massive amount of attention here in the
United States. Just as the murders in London caused an unmistakable
national fear, furor, and confusion, the killing of black children in At¬
lanta, Georgia, spawned an unrelenting chaos that was covered almost
daily on national television.

Atlanta has boomed magnificently since the late 1950s. People
from all over the South flocked there, and those with artistic aspira¬
tions no longer moved north to make their way, since the city had be¬
come so cosmopolitan. By 1970, Atlanta became the big shot city of
the South. In fact, visitors from up north came to Atlanta as tourists—
and many stayed. From its place in history—it was, for example, the
birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. on “Sweet Auburn” Avenue and
home to nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church—to Ted Turner’s CNN, the
region had proven itself to be truly diverse, a mighty force for eco¬
nomics and politics in the United States. Yet even today deeply in¬
grained racism rears its camouflaged head like a copperhead snake,
especially when you look and listen closely in a local bar or in a restau-

140 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

rant. Tom Wolfe writes extensively about it in his fiction in A Man in
Full. But when you see it in real life, it’s so much more.

In the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Atlanta bore the bur¬
den of one of the highest crime rates in the country. The crime prob¬
lem was complicated by extreme poverty in the black community,
which was devastating to its residents. In early 1979, a well-known
white doctor and a legal secretary were murdered by black people.
Then in July 1979, the lives of two black teen boys, Edward Hope
Smith and Alfred Evans, were taken, marking the commencement of
a troubling crime pattern that would dwarf the murders of the doc¬
tor and the legal secretary. Edward and Alfred loved playing sports
and were fans of the Atlanta Falcons; these kids loved life. I looked
at photos of the faces of the teens, fresh and round and full of hope
despite their poverty. They were kids with smiling faces who in no
way should have suffered injury, let alone murder (Edward, by gun¬
shot; Alfred, probably by strangulation); they had so much more of
life left to live. But twenty-seven more lives would be extinguished
inexplicably over the course of the next two years in an almost sur¬
real series of murders that would parallel the apprehension, mistrust,
and near hysteria of the good people across the water who feared the
Yorkshire Ripper.

Kids just kept dying. Fourteen-year-old Milton Harvey disappeared
while riding a bike to the bank. Nine-year-old Yusef Bell, a smart, well-
liked child, never returned from an errand to buy a neighbor a tin of
snuff. Twelve-year-old Angel Lenair was found tied to a tree with elec¬
trical cord, panties that were not her own forced into her mouth. A day
later, ten-year-old Jeffrey Mathis never returned from a trip to the store
to purchase cigarettes for his mother. Fourteen-year-old Eric Middle-
brooks was repairing his bicycle when he was killed with a bludgeon.
Then twelve-year-old Christopher Richardson was murdered while on
his way to the local municipal pool. The slayer became bolder as the
seasons changed. Seven-year-old LaTonya Wilson was kidnapped from
her home, never to be seen alive again.

The seven senseless crimes ushered in the dawn of a summer of hell
for Atlantans. Yes, the police messed up investigations in England re-

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams

141

garding the Ripper case. But that was nothing compared to the nearly
laughable investigative activities of many of the authorities in Atlanta,
who misidentified the victims’ bodies and sometimes destroyed essen¬
tial evidence at the scene of a crime. Some of the victims were thought
to be missing runaways and their cases weren’t pursued as possible
murders. An eleven-year-old boy who called the task force created to
deal with the murders, a boy who was in obvious fear when he phoned,
was consequently ignored. Patrick Baltazar was later found strangled to
death.

Atlanta’s people of color were justifiably worried, angry, and at their
wit’s end. One frustrated group got together and walked through their
community with baseball bats in hand. Even as they walked together
in a show of force, the nightmare continued and a young member of
their community disappeared and was himself murdered. Celebrities
like Muhammad Ali and Atlanta-born Gladys Knight came to Atlanta’s
aid by donating money to help the victims’ families. But many of the
donations never got to the relatives. As the errors continued, some of
the money was actually lost or misplaced.

At the height of the murders, I was asked to appear as a guest on a
Washington, D.C., AM radio talk show. It was a less crazy time for
radio talk shows back then, as hysterical hosts hadn’t yet invaded the
market with their constant tirades. Jeffrey St. John at WRC-AM wasn’t
a milquetoast kind of personality, but he wasn’t Don Imus, either. After
introducing me to his early-evening audience, the talk show host asked
me about my work, just as many other journalists and interviewers had
in the past. They were the typical questions: what do you do, what do
you see, what do you find, how do you stomach it?

From a phone in my office, I explained my work for about a half
hour. Then he asked the question “Who do you think has been killing
the children in Atlanta?”

I took a deep breath. When you’re about to put yourself on the line,
you really have to ask yourself, Do you trust your own judgment? Do
you trust what you’ve learned? Are you willing to be considered a com¬
plete idiot by your peers and by the people who are listening to you?
Are you going to go out on a limb and expect someone to saw it off

142 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

behind you? I felt I was ready, but I knew full well that what I was
about to say would not be taken lightly.

“I feel it’s someone in the community, someone who knows the
community well.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked St. John.

“Well, he’s probably in his twenties or thirties. He’s probably some¬
one who has many acquaintances but no very close friends. He may be
seen as a nice, quiet, and helpful man who doesn’t annoy anyone. And
my impression would be that the person who would do this is black.”

And that’s when the phone calls started coming in. The response
was hostile, hostile, hostile. And most of the callers were people of
color. They felt I was being racist.

Asked one caller, “What right do you have saying this about black
people? Why are you trying to cause trouble?”

It was clear that the audience couldn’t believe that a person of color
could have committed these terrible crimes. Some angered callers men¬
tioned the paucity of black serial killers in American history; others
mentioned newspaper reports that quoted officials who were con¬
vinced that the eventual suspect would be a white man. It went on and
on. The question had exposed something beyond the murders in At¬
lanta: the continual travails regarding race relations in America.

Sitting at my desk as the host signed off, still holding the receiver
of the phone, I was stunned by the callers’ comments. After I hung up,
I turned off the lights to leave my office.

I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. At home, while I chopped up
romaine and butterhead lettuce for dinner and cooked up two steaks,
it all weighed on me. When my husband asked what was wrong, I
mentioned what had happened, but I didn’t explain it with the real
emotion and sadness I felt. At night, alone after he had gone to bed, I
second-guessed myself.

This was the first time that the possibility that the serial killer in At¬
lanta could be black had been broached publicly. It might have been
thought of behind closed doors at meetings of police and politicians,
but no one had come out and said it. Yet I was still surprised at the
level of hostility. I wasn’t doing anything personal. I was imparting

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams | 143

what I thought to be a sound theory that was based on what I had
learned from and about other serial killers. It’s true that there aren’t
that many black serial killers in America, but I felt that if the person
was white, he would have been noticed by people in the black com¬
munity. Someone would have seen something. However, someone who
was a member of the community would have been able to move
around freely without being noticed. To me, it was as simple as that.

I wondered too if I should deal at all with the media, and I came to
the conclusion that, yes, they do help. To this day, I still trust the media
to tell the story about serial killers, but I’m much more wary about
what their motives might be. Initially, I think I expected that they just
wanted to present information to people. I never thought about them
in the context that they want to sell something. One of the things that
people usually don’t look at is the possibility of an ulterior motive for
media bias or involvement, such as presentation of a specific viewpoint
not only in editorials but also in news stories. It’s not as much about
the principles of journalism, not as much about who, what, when,
where, and why—not anymore.

But had I gone overboard? Had I said something to the radio audi¬
ence that was completely wrong? Was I making an assumption? I had
no factual basis for what I said, but I had research and history behind
me. Was I overstepping my bounds as a researcher to say that this is
what I expect would happen, since I hadn’t scientifically discovered
facts that would support my idea? I went through that process for at
least a couple of days. I came to the conclusion that what I said on the
program was what I truly believed. Whether he was or he wasn’t of
color, it wasn’t going to stop my research. I would have to go on and
shrug off the feeling of doubt that had nagged at me for days.

I hadn’t been involved with the police or the authorities in the At¬
lanta investigation. The whole thing had become increasingly political
(much of which is well documented by James Baldwin in The Evidence
of Things Not Seen), but I had begun to follow the awful events even
more closely than I had before my comments on the radio show. And
then I received a call from a high-level member of the Atlanta task
force.

144 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

I made it clear immediately that I did not want to become a mem¬
ber of the task force. One of the things that’s so hard in my line of
work is trying to be separate and independent. What had been driven
home in the last few weeks was the fact that more than ever, I didn’t
want to belong to anybody or be identified with any group. If I be¬
longed to this task force, then I became like a policeman and my work
would be compromised. It’s like a forensic psychiatrist being so in¬
volved with the FBI that he goes to Quantico to learn to be a sharp¬
shooter. Is he being a physician/researcher or does he want to be one
of those guys? I didn’t want to be one of them.

Additionally, I was very aware that the South is not the North. The
ties there are those of blood and of extended family, and an outsider
would not be welcomed. I couldn’t break into that in a short period of
time. I wasn’t going to try.

I did what I could on the phone, however.

“Dr. Morrison, what did you make of the fact that this person
down here has been throwing bodies into the river?”

“We have seen here in Chicago that John Wayne Gacy disposed of
bodies in that way.”

“Would a killer stick to that pattern?”

“Not necessarily. He might well vary it, and he could do that easily.”

“Interesting. Because the pattern varies down here.”

The patterns of killing were indeed assorted. The killer wanted by
the task force went from killing boys to killing girls to killing young
adult men. He dumped the dead off bridges and he placed them in a
ravine and even in a school. In the darkness of early morning on May
22, 1981, police heard a splash off the Jackson Parkway Bridge that
spanned the Chattahoochee River. Officers stopped twenty-three-year-
old Wayne Bertram Williams, a self-described but unsuccessful music
industry entrepreneur, after he traversed the same bridge from which
the splash had been heard. Everyone felt they had a huge break in the
case, especially after a body was found in the water shortly after
Williams was interrogated. But Williams himself never confessed to
any of the crimes. There were no fingerprints to match to Williams’s,
and the green fibers found on many of the victims and in the house in

The Yorkshire Ripper and Wayne Williams | 145

which Williams lived with his parents were fibers so common that
many homes could have had that kind of carpeting. Still, two blood¬
stains discovered in cars Williams used were consistent with the blood
types of two victims who were stabbed to death. But DNA tests, rare
in the early 1980s, were never performed to link the blood to those
who were murdered.

After a trial in which those in the Georgia courtroom were dizzied
by the seemingly endless amount of fiber evidence, a jury composed of
four whites and eight blacks convicted Williams to two life sentences,
and today he sits at Valdosta State Prison. There are those who still
firmly believe in the innocence of Wayne Williams, including some of
the victims’ mothers. No one will precisely know the true story about
the killings for which he was condemned until the results of DNA test¬
ing become available for all to see. And I hope the Georgia courts allow
that process to begin soon. Because if Wayne Williams is innocent, he
is owed a new trial and perhaps an ardent apology and eventual free¬
dom. If he is guilty, however, he deserves to continue his long life in
prison.

As for me, these two cases made me somewhat more suspicious of
some of the media with which I had to deal. In the future, I’d have to
pick and choose more carefully, because the way some of them inter¬
preted what I said did me no good. More important, they really didn’t
serve their readers, listeners, and viewers with objectivity or honesty.

Photographs

Depicted in this antiquated
Romanian wall drawing is
Vlad Tepes. “Vlad the
Impaler” is often labeled a
serial murderer because he
was responsible for killing
thousands in the 1400s.

But I don’t believe he was a
serial killer at all, as you’ll
discover. (© by Reuters newmedia

INC./CORBIS)

Albert Fish stunned Manhattan in the 1920s with the killing and cannibalism of
young Gracie Budd (the remains of which police search for here). An X ray later
revealed Fish had stuck pins and needles into his groin area. <® by bettmann/corbis)

The affable-looking Ed Gein made an
ashtray of a woman’s skull and fashioned
a suit of her skin, which he wore. But
when I met with him at the Mendota
Mental Health Institute, he was all used
up and ready to die. (© by bettmann/corbisj

(Left) Richard Macek was labeled “The Mad
Biter” by the media. This photo of one of his
deep bite marks on a victim shows why.

(Opposite) Richard Macek sent me many
letters, but one of the most startling was
this one, in which he suddenly confused
me with his wife.

On the surface, this
landscape painting
by John Gacy seems
perfectly realistic
and cheery. On
closer examination,
the perspective is off
kilter, somewhat
like Gacy’s mind.

PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS VS. JOHN GACY:
THE FUNCTIONING OF THE INSANITY DEFENSE AT THE
LIMITS OF THE CRIMINAL LAW

Donald H.J. Hermann*

Helen L. Morrison**

Yvonne Sor***

Julie A. Norman****

David M. Neff*****

I. Introduction

The conviction of John Gacy in 1980 of 33 counts of murder demonstrates
the limits of the criminal law in a number of significant ways. As one of the state’s
jprosecuting attorneys put it: “John Gacy now had the singular notoriety of having
convicted of more murders than anyone in American history.” 1 Mass murder
|tself involves crime at the outermost extreme of prohibited conduct. Homicide,
serious criminal offense, is multiplied. At the same time, this case
tmonstrates the limits of the criminal justice system in providing protection for
ie citizen. For four years boys and young men literally disappeared from the streets
Chicago and its suburbs without any serious efforts by the police to determine
lir whereabouts. 2 Family members and friends of the missing persons were unable
induce effective investigation, and other victims were unable to persuade
Ihorities to instigate prosecutorial action.’ Even with the conviction of Gacy,
criminal law has been pushed to the limit in its efforts to fashion a proper
losition for this offender. Given the psychiatric evaluation of Gacy neither a
linal sentence nor a program of treatment for a mentally disordered offender
Ibe adequate or appropriate. The case suggests the need to consider the possibility
Irmanent isolation and incapacitation of dangerous persons who are not treatable
lehabilitable, nor properly subject to execution.

case like John Gacy’s is most often not the subject of study in a legal

i * Judicial Fellow of United Slates Courts, 1983-1984. Professor of Law and Professor of
ly, DcPaul University. A.B., Stanford University, 1965; J.D., Columbia University, 1968; LL.M,,
niversity, 1974; M.A.. Northwestern University, 1979; Ph.D., Northwestern University, 198L
M.D., Medical College of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, 1972. Currently director of ihe
Ccmer in Chicago, Illinois. The Center assesses physical and emotional b rain function. Cer-
American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in General Psychiatry and Child Psychiatry;
Board of Forensic Psychiatry. Member, American Psychiatric Association; American
c Association; American Academy of Psychiatry and Law; American Academy of Forensic

■A.. B.S., Mundeleine College, 1970; M.S., Northwestern University, 1982; J.D. DePau!
983. Teaching Fellow DePaul University.

Northeast Missouri University, 1967; J.D. DePaul University, 1984.

B.S., Northwestern University, 1982; J.D. (candidate), DePaul University, 1985.

1 T. Sullivan & P. Maiken, Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders 340-41 (1983).

’ See, C. I.inedecker, The Man Who Killed Boys 216-17 (1980).

’ See generally behind Growing Worry Over Runaway Youths. 86 U.S News and World Report
63 (Jan. 15, 1979).

1169

The lengthy article I cowrote in the West Virginia
Law Review was a turning point in my research
career. My profile of John Gacy began to change the
way people think about serial murderers and the
insanity defense.

Like the beacon of
the lighthouse,
Your love reaches
me.

j-thtl

Dear Dr. Morrison,

Just a short note to lot you and your
Staff know that I received the 12 Magizines
Thanks much for sending them, always enjoy
reading them. Nothing new to tell you,
waiting to hear from ny last letter to you.

Note, that Pam Lane, is not what I thought
she was, I asked Harlan, and he told me
that I had it wrong, she is a family
psychologist, 1 ves in a suburb of Dallas,
called Graoevine. He gave me her full
address, in case I wanted to talk to her
myself. Talked with Karen, she is just out
of the hosoital, with lack surgery, will be
layed up 4 to 6 weeks. Mother is getting
forgetful again to the ooint of not talcing
her medication, and who people are in the
house. I haven't heard from her since the

end of January. Well I will close again. Thanks, for Magazines.
Arise, shine; for thy light ia come, and the
glory of the Lord ia risen upon thee.

Isaiah 60:1

Gacy was fond of sending greeting cards. In this one, painted by jewel thief
Murph the Surf, Gacy’s typewritten comments show no emotion, even when he
talks about his sick mother. The card’s inscription, “Your love reaches me,” is
ironic to say the least.

This wedding photo shows Gacy playing the role of devoted husband and loving
son. No one in his family knew that John had a dark, murderous side.

Police involved in the Wayne Williams child murders pulled this unfortunate
victim from the muddy Chattahoochee River at midnight on April 1, 1981.
When I spoke out about the Williams case before he was apprehended, I was
greeted by much anger and hostility.

Serial killers sometimes psychologically overpower their partners, as Alton
Coleman did with girlfriend Debra Brown. The “partnership killers” went on a
killing spree in 1984 and even used Vise-Grip pliers on the head and face of one

victim. (© BY BETTMANN/CORBIS)

John Gacy’s brain was given to me for scientific purposes after he died. I’ve kept
pieces of it for many years in a plastic container.

DRUGS HOR

TORTURE

SEX ACTS

TODD'S RESPONSE

BERDELLA'8 COMMENTSs OBSERVATIONS; AND CARE

SUBMISSION

ACTS

Trw . r

Riant tock

Some craat* (rn«n

4-17-J4

7:50 PM

(C pc 449)

hits and masrle
contraction In hi*
stomach aria (C pg 449)

8.00 PM

l.ying an hit ildt

-| don't know irir* clmtflrd a* •emillng, bat rigorcItaUas tome-

(C ft 449)

■ [thing. tame oral

rrc»>liit*tlag on a more po»»l»r level, bringing *tor( «p Into lb*

iU<ku|t. HU tfta blank.

(C pc 449)

mooth and than Ju*t posrlag oot o( llir nioolh (C pg 449)

Butt luck

Groat*, no rantcl*

(C pc -HP)

reaction <C pc «49)

S:4S PM

b'KG'* 1* the leg*

No oral discharge, no oral

<c n

Tocallutlea
(C PS 449)

Oils PM

Started (o bend

Franl Fuck

No reaction

bit (loser* and
band*

(C pc 440)

(C ft 449)

(C p, 449)

0:45 PM

v „

T ha*« a natation here L«e*c which I gnaa* wontd Jtul re(«r to anal

(C pc 450)

■.all. Referring to the eye*; *1 tht* point T wo* trying to blind him. A*

far *« th. KKG; hi* rnuiele* would have tlglilened up bet II wai not a

(C p« 450)

movement that ha made) II wa* J«*t th* elerUlcIty (C pg 450-1)

10:30 PM

is XU Is (be eye
(C pc 450)

Front Pack
(C PS 4S1)

Blind him la dltablo him a* far a* any long'lmn captivity. *1 might
make a natation here, a footnote. At this Ume bit body waa not only
dealing with chemical* that I wat potting Into it, but alto the

chemical* that he Injected bln*«elf with. One of the most nolleaabU ||

effect* -a* that while fit a po.ltlon where he wat totally tran^nllltad. ||
he got an crccllon- 1 taet* the ciclliment or energy had gone to hi* j

pent..' (C pg 451) .1

11:00 PM

•Jolt that be wa* either finding owl that be wa* rutrlcled or that

(C pc ««>

(Cpt4S2>

hi* hand* and back area

there wa* lome kind o( movement Into the hand* and back area. (C

(C p| 452)

Pt 452)

UilS PM

He was trying to 11(1 hb
bead (C pf 452)

Ili4( PM

Ketamine I.S tt
neck <C n 452)

Soma grant* (C pc 452)

In this page from Robert Berdella’s crime diary, he chronicles his torture
objectively, coldly.

S 7 /4m

Q/H&rM''

^zrZzz* *

jy« AZ A*~

<sf!/l<f' SbeyjA'XS

ytsmtx yXfixX'

xA

Wla

jssyl-

J

sM&m***-**-

? w' rr ^2j

-/

a- Aprjp^.

J&T/ ?'''* \ *»*

s, -

AtUvr- ^y^

S^TtS#/ *Z/ /a ' L

/A

A/AM

J

*& & . .../Zx x jx .pat. my^/JSXl-, AAZ a^dAnx*
s?rL X K/4trfp .4 &/'<///' AX XtZrrs sfA/jp &/&>£&■

/ -r**™ r zs' / * j* „ «——- m~> ,Z~ *—■//

*/-#*- 4/u ^
&w #** ^4-^ ^

BobbyJoe Long wrote to me
about his dreams, but the
content of his letters was
not so different from those I
received from other serial
killers. Even in his dreams he
was overly concerned with
being sick.

CtMy At/#. Mt-'f A fter.. &d!£*&&P /n? jZ&JZ/L
ttfjr STJAa/’^

/aoxx x_ yx/J Xx yu/d^ tc rrxy

_ X 2 Z t/ t/py n//e<j/> -m> <z>j£ 7 c

oM& yte/ H TA /£T &X?/ 4m&A/> _ Z7X
-T//** -r /j/a r y /Q/z /ry/x ax y? sS/>ca? j s'<o / s
Tysf/ ■r' vy A/M/X-yi /3e~/xx/ sj / X/i //- ■
.2~7V A/ar X X ceff /yr /s/A/ y re. n/ Xo it/ my
// tr y jgur £•/, g~/g . ~ra x #/ aUr 7-//^f-y /?/- t /zx t/z*

6xj-

JH4X.

/-'// /hx 7 7 rxy /o / /j° ////m Xas ' ■■////--

i/)Za7r- Z71SXAJ /&t/a UJ - WrZ y?

_ t/yxy //y/r/g tv XA///r u//f//, ^f/U/r A/a&a&a
MA£(TJ ^fA /y Ff Eo^T 7 -* /VA/eyr x^7- sf/uy

xy s //-<

A?y/7 sxn-

n7A y /IX AA / dJrxT Xxx ag/ /?, /?,
y/Ary j r/u , x /y /3xr /3<rrryr/r,

-t/xa'.,

X)s/ur Z/A/y txx/-///(/</ / //J/r f~M/ r.

_ 14/ArT/u r//xy py/xxsr /V/r /aJZ

7V/7 t& £/»S//A f/zy rv/AT

JfrA r /?//lA-r'/y>£/,

_ Miy /5/Z J/fiZ /Zy/?rs,

_ JT Ayr/rz wrAy / ry TZ /a/u

X.A/V' X2/X-/C.

tfrm r Af/SAT/C /rxx//A/<? /ijrr</’///r. xr/y

Acu/zz ££'/' y?/$ />ur x// /-//xxs S// r '/r/ ? J

X/? /i/r yr/ZU/X , -7 7-/7 Ay/sr, _

A/Z 7 / J X/ZX ■r-// gyxyy, 7/777 //A/-

Eventually, Bobby Joe Long began to write to me in capital
letters in an odd combination of anger against his victims,
desperation, self-pity, hypochondria, even hope.

NINE

BOBBY JOE LONCj’S
LETTERS AND DREAMS

W ith the exception perhaps of California, Florida is a land of
dreams, our land of dreams, affordable, warm, and within
reach for young and old alike. People across the country flock to
Florida, especially during the stormy winter months when snow falls
by the foot for midwesterners like me. American artist Winslow
Homer wintered in Florida, painting Palms in the Storm there. Ernest
Hemingway lived and played in the Keys, and Tennessee Williams
wrote his dramas and painted there. Even the mention of the Sunshine
State gets our minds going, yearning for the placid beaches, the palm
trees, and for sand warming the toes during oceanside strolls at sunset.

For me, I’d gone boating with my husband in Tampa Bay, and we
were relaxing while fishing. It seemed I could forget all the troubles in
the world as I watched him teach our oldest child how to fish. I was
touched when he said, “When I was about your age, my uncle John
taught me how to fish, and now I want to teach you what I have
learned.” Passing on knowledge to children: there’s nothing better than
that, I thought. Out there in Tampa Bay we were expectant because
someone said we might catch huge tarpon or even a sailfish, but it
didn’t matter because we were spending time together away. For me,

148 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

that meant some time away from serial killers, which I actually stopped
thinking about when I reeled in an elusive ten-pound bonefish, much
to everyone’s surprise.

It was probably that dream for a better life in the sun that Louella
Long sought for herself and her son when she packed her bags and
boarded a Greyhound bus for Florida, leaving her husband, Joe, behind
in dusty Kenova, West Virginia. For a while, that dream came closer to
reality for Louella, or so Louella thought. But within her young son,
there seethed an anger that began to grow as the boy reached school
age. The two moved from place to place, often renting a room in some¬
one else’s home. Although Louella seemed to be oblivious to it, he
began to harbor a dislike for his mother that eventually turned to ha¬
tred. For instance, he and his mother reportedly slept in the same bed
until Bobby Joe was twelve. Part of this was the result of circumstances:
they often lived in one room of someone else’s home, so living space
was a precious commodity. But part of it was the result of an overpro-
tective, smothering nature that was ingrained into Louella’s personal¬
ity. This overmothering may have added to Long’s inability to function
without structure. In one of his first letters to me, Long wrote,
“Mother is a strange one, she’s always been so overdramatic, always
been so negative about me in life ... I NEVER once hit her. I wanted
to. I wanted to twist her head off, but I never did.”

Indeed, it wasn’t Louella who was the recipient of his frequent rage.
Lie got into brutal fistfights in school over his misshapen teeth and
with his various relatives. Long said to me:

I used to have terrible fights with my aunts and my cousins, that many
times would end up with my hands around their throats. Over and over,
they all used to tell me, “You’re crazy,” or “You’re going to end up killing
someone,” or “You’re going to end up in prison for killing someone.”
Most of this was between the age of ten to twelve years old, and I used
to think—no way —they are the crazy ones, I could never kill anyone.

There were these times when it was me against them and the dam
would break, and I’d get ahold of one of them. It was awful. Then,
they’d all start their “You’re crazy” or “You’re gonna kill someone”

Bobby Joe Longs Letters and Dreams | 149

garbage. Then my mother would end up beating my ass or some other
type punishment, never considering or believing that about half the
time the whole thing started because I was taking up for her while she
was gone, and they started calling her a whore or slut.

Looking back now, it’s too bad I didn’t go ahead and kill one of
them. I’d have gotten the help I needed.

By help, Long meant psychiatric and social intervention, probably
some kind of juvenile detention and an eventual easing back into soci¬
ety. He knew that Florida and West Virginia wouldn’t have jailed a
minor, nor would they have considered the death penalty for a minor.
Inside, in whatever speck of rectitude he had, Bobby Joe Long wished,
like many of us do, that he could somehow undo the past. It was not
so much to save the lives of the innocents he killed (he harbored no
guilt), but to save his own skin. Though he didn’t kill any of his rela¬
tives, Bobby was proud of his fistfighting ways, as he wrote in his let¬
ter of April 2, 1985. “[I] boxed in the Boys Club, Army, and Golden
Gloves. Had more street fights than I can imagine having had. I used
to like it, I was good at it. I grew up fighting, always the new kid. Al¬
ways having to prove myself. I guess it carried over. I’ve ruined several
guys faces, real good.” As I read the words, I could almost see him
bragging about bashing those faces during those old battles, his mus-
tached lips curling into a self-satisfied grin. Then, as if he had told a
chummy story with a heartwarming ending, he ended his letter,
“Nighty night.” It was so incongruous, but that’s what makes a serial
killer. You’ll never know exactly how they’ll appear next.

As a child, Long would neglect his schoolwork to the point of fail¬
ing and had to repeat first grade. Even though he disliked the regimen
of school, it wasn’t the teachers that disturbed him so much. He felt his
life was dark and lonely, writing:

I was always alone as a kid. . . . No brothers or sisters, no parents
really. I hated most of the people (family or otherwise) who lived
with (off) us. We were never stable anywhere for more than a year till
I was 12, so no close childhood friends, till then. I always felt I was

150 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

born a hundred years too late. I’d have been perfectly happy in the
Frontier days, up on a mountain in a cabin, on my own, with nobody
around to bother me. I’d have loved it. A dog or two, to hell with
everyone else.

When I read this, I thought how the rest of the country and the
people of Tampa would have loved it too if Long were in a faraway
time in a place where he would have never taken a life.

Long continued to expound upon nature and his dreams that could
never be, and about loves he had lost. It was just too sugary sweet and
banal at that. Then, suddenly, he wrote, “I am . . . Darkness, I always
have been.” Using darkness with a capital D as he did, he must have
pumped himself up to believe he was evil incarnate, like some ram¬
horned devil out of The Exorcist, as if some immortal power lived in¬
side him. While he may have been trying to achieve some effect with
his words, I had seen too many of these people already to be disturbed
by what they write on a piece of paper. It would probably surprise him
to hear it, but it was clear that Bobby Joe was the “overdramatic” one.

He did, however, contemplate what it meant to be bad early on.
“When I was 12 or so, I started thinking how easy it would be for me
to become one of the wild animals I knew. Kids who were always in
trouble, mean, cruel, drugs, wild in every sense.” Bobby Joe wrote that
he felt he was strong enough to avoid that road, or at least outgrow it.

But by then it had already started, with his frequent beatings of his
cousins. And there was something else, odd eyes his grandmother said
Bobby Joe so frantically feared, feared so much he’d run into the closet
to hide. Explained Bobby in a letter,

I’ve always had a thing about eyes. What’s the saying—eyes are the
window to a persons soul. OK, I don’t believe in a soul, but Yes, I
think they are a window to the person inside. Its hard to lie or fool
someone when they’re looking in your eyes. Too weird. Looking into
those girls eyes while they died. None of them looked back into mine
very long. Maybe they could see it, that they were going to die. Usu¬
ally they looked over or past me. All but Simms. I kept her blind-

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams | 151

folded and tried to knock her out first. I didn’t want to look at her. I
don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid she would see it, and I didn’t
want her to. I didn’t want her to know she was dying, I liked her.
Maybe I was afraid I couldn’t or wouldn’t go through with it if I was
looking in her eyes. Maybe both. I don’t know.

Bobby Joe met his girlfriend Cindy at a young age, and in some
ways they were inseparable, kindred spirits. At the very least, they
shared a need for rebellion. Soon enough, though, Bobby began com¬
paring her to someone he hated. Bobby wrote,

I saw Cindy turning into another Louella (Mother) in many many
ways. Like always running around, bitching moaning and groaning if
she didn’t get her way, unreasonable, and either playing head games or
the Silent treatment, without ANY real communication.

She started changing not too long after we were married. Person¬
ality wise, sexually, really about any way she could. I guess it’s no new
thing. She got what she wanted since we were 16.

After reading this, one thing became very clear. An arrogant Bobby
Joe lived with the recognition that he was not in control of those clos¬
est to him, his mother and his wife, Cindy. Noted psychiatrist Melanie
Klein believes that a baby in the first six months of its life, feels a con¬
stant paranoia, a watchfulness, lying there on its back vulnerable and
prone, unable to get anything for itself. An infant can do nothing but
lie there and see and look. If a serial killer has the emotional level of a
baby as I believe he does, a killer like Bobby Joe has no real control
over his family Long wanted to “twist off” his mother’s head. He
wanted to kill Cindy. But emotionally he couldn’t get beyond that fan¬
tasy. It wasn’t as if he projected this fantasy onto other women when
he killed. With the emotional maturity of a baby Bobby Joe couldn’t
even act upon a concept as complicated as projection.

As a criminal, Bobby Joe Long became a compulsive rapist first and
moved into serial killing fairly quickly. Long raped over 50 women

152 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

(though some believe it was closer to 150, because the assaults began
as far back as the mid-1970s). In early 1984, after he and Cindy had
divorced, Bobby Joe lavished jewelry upon a new girlfriend, gems and
rings and necklaces he stole and sometimes tore from the bodies of the
women he attacked. Although Long didn’t have the money to purchase
any of the rather expensive gifts, his girlfriend never questioned the
origin of the presents. Long’s methodology in these attacks often cen¬
tered around the pretense of responding to an advertisement in the
local newspaper, sometimes for the sale of bedroom furniture, some¬
times for the sale of a house.

After buzzing the doorbell, he listened closely for the sounds of
footsteps. He’d stand at the door, waiting in anticipation, shifting from
foot to foot. Once the door was cracked open, Long was affable and al¬
most handsome to some. If he saw a woman, he looked the woman
straight in the eye and smiled. “I’m interested in buying. Can I come
in and have a look around?” Much of the time he was permitted entry.
If the woman at the door blanched, however, he’d simply force his way
in. Then he’d tie her up and rape her viciously, sometimes over and
over again, “usually two or three times,” according to Long.

And then his violence escalated beyond rape.

The Hillsborough Country sheriff’s department is located in the Ybor
City section of Tampa, an area famous for its cigar-making factories
where wonderful old craftsmen roll cigars by hand in huge spaces and
tobacco covers the floor like sawdust. In a nearby nondescript build¬
ing, the department (in tandem with the FBI) began investigating the
murders of Tampa’s women, and all those murders had similarities. At
the peak, the murders occurred at a rate that staggered officials—one
every other week. Often they were found in rural, almost bucolic
settings—in an orange grove or near a cattle ranch. The first mutilated
body that was found was discovered nude, that of a pretty Asian female
with shoulder-length permed hair, a former exotic dancer at a Tampa
club who was about to attend the University of South Florida. Coinci¬
dentally, her last name was also Long, Nguen Thi Long. Nguen Thi
Long was found lying facedown by two teenagers playing with toy

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams | 153

parachutes in a pasture. A parachute one boy threw came to rest on the
Laotian woman’s partially decomposed remains. She had been stran¬
gled, bound, and gagged, and the feet of her small body had been
pulled so far apart that there was a five-foot distance between them, al¬
most as if Long had tried to pull her legs off. The askew form of her
body stunned longtime Detective Lee Baker, so much so that he be¬
lieved her hips were broken from the strain.

Hillsborough County on Florida’s west coast is an area of over a
thousand square miles that includes Tampa. Beyond the quaintness of
Ybor City, it’s a vibrant area that some say rivals Miami in its metro¬
politan beauty. Before the case of Bobby Joe Long, this tourist destina¬
tion had averaged fewer than three dozen murders each year and had
never before dealt with a serial murderer of Bobby Joe Long’s magni¬
tude. But the authorities immediately believed that Nguen Thi Long’s
legs were pulled far apart and that she was bound for a sick and sadis¬
tic reason. They thought these might be the signatures of a murderer
who might strike again. After police sent various items to the FBI lab in
Washington, D.C., a single red nylon fiber was also discovered near the
victim, probably torn from the floor of the car being driven. This par¬
ticular break in the case was kept concealed, since officials feared the
killer would change his way of murdering if the evidence was leaked to
local media. Police hoped against hope that he wouldn’t strike again.

Fourteen days later, while cruising in his red Dodge Magnum,
Bobby Joe Long stopped near a pretty but world-weary young woman,
a former California beauty contestant turned prostitute who had
moved to Tampa that very day. He chatted her up, complimenting her
until she stepped into his car. Still shooting the breeze, he drove her to
Park Road, the local lovers’ lane. But it wasn’t love or even attraction
that was on Long’s mind. He bound twenty-two-year-old Michelle
Denise Simms, tying her neck with thick, rough rope, fashioned that
into a kind of hangman’s noose, and tied her hands with clothesline,
and placed her facedown in the back of his vehicle. He bashed her head
with his fists until her beautiful face was almost unrecognizable. He
raped her, then threw her from the car.

Michelle, however, was still alive. When he tried to strangle her,

154 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Michelle decided to fight against Long. As retribution, he slashed her
throat . . . again, again, and again. From a tree, he hung her blood-
drenched clothes. When the authorities found her, her eyes were filled
with blood. Even the peach nail polish on her toes was chipped.

Long proudly admitted to me, “That was the most violent killing I
did. The most gruesome.”

The same kind of lustrous red nylon fiber that was discovered on
the Asian woman was found on young Simms. The broad rope used
was the same as well. Then another woman, shy, bespectacled Eliza¬
beth Loudenback, was found facedown, dead, in a rural area amid ver¬
dant orange trees, and the red nylon fiber was again discovered.
Various microscopes and a microspectrophotometer confirmed that
the dyes from all of the fibers were the same. Elizabeth had been
bound, raped, and strangled to death with a length of rope.

Long’s method of strangulation was not the same kind of thing one
regularly sees on television or in the movies. In most entertainment,
ten or fifteen seconds is all that it takes for someone to expire from
being choked. Reality isn’t so quick, nor is it so tidy. The victim strug¬
gles and screams. The eyes bulge, and blood vessels in the eye burst, so
the eye appears blood-filled. It can take as long as ten minutes for a
killing by stranglehold, and in Long’s case, he sometimes broke the
hyoid bone, a U-shaped bone in the upper neck, tucked just beneath
the skull. He’d pull along a woman facedown on the ground with so
much force that her features were sometimes no longer there, scraped
away by pebbles, rocks, and sandy dirt. While he raped her, sometimes
anally, he pulled on a collar made from a rope attached to her neck,
yanking horribly hard, as if he were trying to tame some wild animal.
Into one victim’s vagina, Bobby Joe Long inserted scissors, perhaps be¬
cause the woman tried to fight back with the scissors before his six-
foot, two-hundred-pound bulk overpowered her. Later, Long would
relate to a TV crew that he once put a TV dinner in the oven and dis¬
covered he had no milk to drink. During his shopping trip, he was
compelled to kill a woman after he had bound her, but he returned to
his apartment afterward, boasting that the TV dinner was still in the
oven, albeit burned.

Bobby Joe Longs Letters and Dreams | 155

Binding his victims may have been Long’s way of completely im¬
mobilizing them. In addition, he placed them on their stomachs.
That’s because people can’t be good fighters when placed on the stom¬
ach. Also, they can’t see what’s going on. But Long didn’t do this only
so the victims wouldn’t see him and identify him. Making women lie
on their stomach is another way to exercise complete control, because
it makes them become completely passive. If they don’t know what’s
coming, they can’t protect themselves. So Long disarmed as many of
their senses as he could. It’s the ultimate terror in a way, because if they
don’t know what’s coming, they may begin to think something bad is
going to happen. Victims then recede into an illogical state where they
can’t really process what’s going on. They can’t try to reason with the
murderer because there’s no way to be prepared or to think clearly, no
way at all.

On November 3, 1984, Long skulked along in his car and spied a
seventeen-year-old girl slowly riding a bicycle equipped with a small
basket in front. She was returning from work at a fast-food restaurant.
After passing the teen and then parking the Magnum, he quietly got
out, softly shut the car door, and hid near a van. When the girl passed,
he grabbed her by her long hair, ripping her from her bike, which fell
in a heap onto the asphalt. Long shoved Lisa McVey into his car and
blindfolded her as the teen shivered with fear. It was the beginning of
a fierce kidnapping during which he repeatedly raped the girl, a kid¬
napping that would last for twenty-six hours. In an oddly surreal mo¬
ment, the injured Lisa sat next to him on his couch, bound, gagged,
and blindfolded while he watched one of her favorite shows on televi¬
sion, Airwolf. As she wondered whether she’d ever again see the
double-amputee father she helped to care for, a news report detailing
her abduction came on the set.

“You don’t need to hear that, do you?” asked Long, switching off
the television. He pushed her onto the bed. As he raped her again, his
mood moved from feelings of pure anger to caring, even fawning. “I
don’t know why I did this,” he said. “You’re such a nice girl.” Then he
showered her, dressed her, put on her shoes, tied the laces, drove her to
a parking lot . . . and freed her.

156 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

The surprising release of Lisa McVey was the beginning of the end
for Bobby Joe—she was instrumental in giving police crucial details
that led to his capture. She had peeked through her blindfold to see the
area where she was driven, if not the precise address of Long’s apart¬
ment. Lisa described Long’s car to a T. Police caught up with Long at
a movie theater and took him into custody after he watched a screen¬
ing of the Chuck Norris action picture Missing in Action.

During the half-dozen times that I spoke face-to-face with Long, he
told me of an eleventh murder that the police tried to pin on him.

“There was this one girl that vanished out of a bar room and
O’Connor [his lawyer], he probably still thinks that I did it, but I
didn’t. Every time I would come upstairs in a little room like this one,
he would be sitting in a corner and . . . O’Connor would throw a paper
clip and it was a clip of this girl and then ask, Where is she? I don’t
know, I said, I told the guy it was about ten of them.”

“So.”

“So, why wouldn’t I tell them about one more?”

“Why not tell them about five or six more?” I felt he had killed
more than ten people and that this might be the time to confront him
with that idea.

“There ain’t no more.” Then he laughed. It was the same kind of
small but nefarious chuckle that Richard Macek would make. It threw
me off for a second or two.

“So how many are there?”

“I hope you don’t start there.” Long was getting defensive.

I softened my tone. “So how many are there?”

cc'-in

ien.

“It’s a small number.”

“I stopped quick.”

“Did you start quick or did you start slow?”

“Slow.”

“Who was your first victim?”

“Murder?”

“Anyone.”

“Some Cuban woman.” She was just “some woman” to Long, not

Bobby Joe Longs Letters and Dreams | 157

a person, not someone who thinks or feels or someone who can be de¬
scribed as having virtues or faults. She was just something to be used.
He didn’t even remember her name.

“When was this?”

“Nineteen seventy-five or seventy-six, Miami.”

“That was the first one? That’s only been ten years.” I felt there
must be more much earlier, but Long wasn’t going to confess to any¬
thing more.

“That’s all,” he reaffirmed.

“That’s not very long, considering most of the people in your cir¬
cumstances started a long time before that.”

“Is that right?” He was getting cocky.

“John Gacy was one. Wayne Williams was another.” Long laughed.
It wasn’t a maniacal laugh, but a kind of condescending low cackle. It
was lacking in emotion and rang hollow. It was completely jarring.
And again, it sounded just like Richard Macek’s laugh. Long ignored
the comment about Gacy and Williams, as though he didn’t want to
talk about anyone but himself.

“Did they run every test in the book on you?”

“These guys here? They did an EEG, they did a mag particle scan
and neuropsychological testing.” Long threw medical terms around
as if he were well informed. In reality, he didn’t really grasp their
meanings.

“What did they come up with?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing. I’m not surprised.”

“They say slight brain damage on both sides, but not enough to
warrant any kind of uncontrollable behavior.”

He continued to be brazen for the rest of the interview. Bobby Joe
had trouble with those who he thought lorded power over him, yet he
had joined the army. Then he often showed up late for formations.
Also, he was put on probation for having sexual relations with the
daughter of an officer even though he was still married to Cindy. In an¬
other of his many mistakes in the service, he was once put in a drug-
rehab unit for abusing various illegal substances.

158 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“You think they had it in for you, singling you out?”

“Everybody there had it in for me. I’m not paranoid. I’m realistic.
I had four or five failure to reports. One was because I was hunting and
decided to go for two weeks, rented an army camper and took Cindy
and went out and stayed for a couple of weeks in the Glades and said
to hell with them. I was getting pretty pissed off by this time. I had no
business in the drug-rehab unit, painting buildings and cutting grass
with swing blades and pick up cigarette butts all damn days and doing
this and all their shit details. They were messing with the drug-rehab
people because if they worked them to death they would sleep and not
do drugs and stay out of trouble.”

Not only did Bobby Joe fail to avoid trouble, but he also upped the
ante in the coming years. When I saw him, Long was incarcerated and
more suspicious than ever. It was up to his court-appointed public de¬
fenders to try to save him from death row. Around Thanksgiving 1984,
I received a telephone message from Charles O’Connor, one of Long’s
attorneys. The message? “Need help on case.” “Need help” was under¬
lined three times by my assistant, Tinamarie. The lawyer seemed some¬
what frantic.

And so I flew down to Tampa. When I spoke with O’Connor and his
colleague Robert Norgard, it seemed to me that they did not yet have a
clear plan of defense for the trial, which was looming. While that’s not
unusual for attorneys, who often wait until the last minute to pound out
their plans of attack, their desperation seemed to indicate they weren’t
completely sure how best to defend their case. Continually during the
many hours I spoke with them, they wondered out loud whether or not
Long could be considered legally insane under Florida law.

Said Norgard, “I’m going to have to determine whether or not he
is legally insane and then I don’t want to use up a lot of credibility by
four days of malarkey in front of a jury.”

Norgard looked directly at me. “Somebody has to tell us how to ap¬
proach, and this is a major decision. Do I say he is insane in the first
phase or do I spot them that because he is possibly not, and then go
into a second phase where I can get what they call aggravating and mit¬
igating circumstances? What do you think I should do?”

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams | 159

Already I didn’t exactly like where this was going. I was there to be
the doctor, not to be the lawyer. “I can tell you what will work. Not
what you should do. I think it would be wise to get to the guilt phase
early and the mitigating circumstances, if you have them. No jury on
God’s little green earth, let alone in Florida, is going to say that this
man is insane.”

“But that’s the question. Did he meaningfully know what he did
was illegal?”

“There’s no meaningful knowing with Long. There is not even
knowing because knowing requires not only the mind to register, but
it requires processing. Long has the emotional maturity of a child.
From what I have seen when I talked to him, he didn’t know and he
still doesn’t know.”

O’Connor began to pace around the room. Both Norgard and O’¬
Connor were having some trouble understanding, yes, but they were
desperately pondering how to present all of it in a court of law.

Norgard then said, “Excuse me if I try to interpret and stop me if I
get it wrong. But are you saying that on some basic level of how peo¬
ple think and how they react that is fundamental, there is a whole
bunch of holes for him? And as he courses around life and he happens
to be over one of those holes, he doesn’t know, in any sense of the word
know, know what is going on.”

Now he was getting it. “More or less right.”

“How do you defend this guy then, which is a pure psychiatric
case:

“With a lot of guts.”

“I’m talking about the simple mechanics.”

“Pretty much in the same way that the defense dealt with John
Gacy in Illinois. You’ve read that West Virginia Law Review article that
I sent, haven’t you?” I had coauthored a lengthy essay about everything
that went on in the Gacy case from the facts to medical theories to the
law that was used in the case.

Norgard leaned forward as one hand held tightly to the arm of his
chair. “Yes, but you have a different standard for sanity in Illinois.”

For hours each day, we went back and forth regarding the intrica-

160 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

cies of Florida law, what medical insanity means and how it related
specifically to the legal insanity case of Bobby Joe Long. Sometimes it
seemed that we were going around in circles. And they continued to
misunderstand.

O’Connor asked, “Do you think he is McNaughton insane?”

When they invoked McNaughton, the lawyers were referring to a
theory of legal insanity dubbed the “McNaughton Rules.” In England,
over 180 years ago, Daniel McNaughton went to trial; he’d murdered
the secretary to English Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. But when tes¬
timony was heard, it was demonstrated that McNaughton was men¬
tally disturbed. The jury in no way wished to send a sick man to the
gallows. They refused to find McNaughton guilty, and he was imme¬
diately sent by the judge to a mental institution. Even today lawyers
and judges use McNaughton Rules to determine legal insanity. Essen¬
tially, if a defendant is unaware of the distinction between right and
wrong at the time he commits the offense or if he’s unable to under¬
stand the charges against him, or if he’s unable to assist in his own de¬
fense, he is probably legally insane.

“I sent you everything I wrote.” In other words, I was saying, if you
read the material, you should know by now how to proceed. I began
to wonder whether they had prepared for the meeting at all and
whether they had read what they should have read.

“You have never said that he is McNaughton crazy. In fact, you are
the first person that I have ever heard say that even one of these yo-yos
is McNaughton crazy.”

Inwardly, I questioned if it was proper, even behind closed doors,
for a lawyer to refer to his client as a “yo-yo.” Instead I said, “I have
said ever since the time I began working with these guys—since
1975—that they are McNaughton crazy.”

“Okay. Well, maybe I didn’t read it right.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Long’s team; I just didn’t know if they
could get the job done. Their lack of a clear strategy worked against
them, as did the facts of the case. Then I heard that the lawyers and
Bobby Joe had spoken to some other psychiatrists for his trial, and I
felt that was not a good sign. As I found with Gacy, too many cooks

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams

161

spoil the broth. One doctor told Long that he must have wanted to be
captured because he felt he had committed too many atrocities. Long
responded to this when he wrote to me:

As for McVey, I have trouble there too, in thinking I let her go because
I “wanted to be caught.”

I let her go because I could not hurt her, even though I knew she
would get me caught.

A subtle difference. But a difference—I think. Don’t you?

I know, then theres the fact that I stayed in Tampa, and even after
they pulled me over, and took my pictures, and I knew they would
come for me. I didn’t try to run.

I still cannot say I wanted the police to catch me. I didn’t want to
go to jail, but I did want it to stop, and I knew if I ran, it would not.

He now wished to be secluded somewhere on a mountaintop, but
Bobby Joe Long’s dreams were trapped in a sixty-three-square-foot
Florida jail cell, which he now was forced to call home.

And he did have dreams. Long, more than any other serial killer,
wrote to me of dreams that were laced with fears. To Bobby Joe, they
were vivid and horrible, a jail sentence of the mind in addition to a jail
sentence of the body.

With all of the dream work that any doctor does, it’s not the dream
so much as the person’s interpretation of the dream that matters. De¬
spite the hundreds of books that have been published, there’s no de¬
finitive dictionary that we turn to that explains to us, for example, that
a spider means a mother or that a wolf means danger. That’s a more
popular psychology approach, which I like to avoid. But if I’m doing
a real study of a person’s dreams, I do it on the basis of what associa¬
tions the person makes to the dream.

On March 31, 1985, at 6 A.M., Bobby wrote to me:

I was in the death cell next to the execution room, waiting for morn¬
ing to come and to be executed.

My thoughts were of my family, my kids [his son and daughter],

162 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

and I was sitting on the bench smoking. (I don’t smoke.) Two zombie¬
looking guards were outside the cell and they just stood there watch¬
ing me the whole time.

Finally one of them who looked to be dead for a couple of weeks
spoke to me in a real slow, low, death like voice saying the priest was
on the way, it was almost time.

The priest showed up and came in and I told him I didn’t want to
talk to him.

He had on a brown monks robes with a hood on and I couldn’t see
his face.

He gave me the old “My son” routine and sat down on my bunk.
I figured, what the hell, and sat down and could smell him. He
smelled like whisky and cigarettes.

He asked me if I believed in God and I said “no.”

He asked me, “why not?” but before I had a chance to speak he
started laughing. He went hysterical, pointing at me and laughing.

I didn’t understand. I thought it was all a joke. Then he threw his
head back for a real good laugh and it was my mother’s face under the
hood, still laughing.

The two guards came in and were also laughing, but very slowly,
they all left together, the two zombie guards and the priest mother.

I could hear them walking away down the hall, laughing all the
way.

Then I was thinking again about the chair. I’ve had the idea before
and in the dream I was convinced that when they fry you, it doesn’t
really kill you. It zaps your brain and nerves but your still alive.

I had visions in the dream that I was watching myself get zapped.
Then the States Dr. comes and quickly pronounces me dead. But I
am not. Then they rush me out on a stretcher all burned and smok¬
ing, and take me to a side room with an autopsy table and equipment
in it.

They put me on the table and the State Dr. starts the autopsy cut¬
ting my chest open, all the way to my crotch.

Then he split the ribs with huge pair of scissor like things, opened
me up.

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams | 163

My heart was still beating, my eyes opened real wide, the Dr.
wasn’t surprised. It was like it always went that way.

He cut my heart out while I watched and slowly was “going.”

I opened my eyes one last time and there was the priest with my
mothers face, and the Dr. looking down at me, both laughing again.

I woke up.

Other women made appearances in Long’s dreams, women with
zombielike features who seemed to be there to haunt him.

I’m not sure where this took place it was in a large bldg and there was
a lot of us (different types—male and female) living in it, I think it
was a prison. None of us liked being there and we were forced to sleep
in old WWII Bomber planes’ machine gun bubbles. Very small, had
to sleep all doubled up, and woke up a lot to move and get blood flow¬
ing again.

Somehow me and one of the girls, nobody I know, nothing spe¬
cial, were leaving and I was going to give her a ride somewhere in my
V.W. bug, where she wanted to go.

Next thing I know I’m asleep and she’s driving, but she’s skidding
all over the road, so I make her stop and I drive.

But when we’re switching and shes getting out and I’m allready in
the drivers seat, she goes weird on me. Phases out, a total blank. She
can’t hear me talk to her or pays no attention, just looks off into space.

Then, she’s half in and half out out of the driver’s door and I can’t
close it. Then 3 or 4 other girls come up, and they’re all acting like
zombies, and go to the back of the car and are rubbing it and just act¬
ing very weird.

Finally I start driving with her half in and half out because I’m get¬
ting worried. It’s not right. It was in Miami, I recognized the streets
and I started to speed up to try to make her let go.

I woke up.

What’s most important about these two dreams is that there’s no
emotional meaning connected to the appearance of the priest and the

164 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

zombielike girls. Dreams can be very important in therapy and psy¬
choanalysis because they can provide a window into the internal life of
a person. But for a serial murderer, dreams to them are just things.
They have no emotional significance. The temptation (which has to be
avoided) is to ascribe meaning to them when to him there is no mean¬
ing. It’s so tempting to say look at this dynamic, this connection, this
link; it seems to say his mother is like the Grim Reaper, who wants to
kill Long. So maybe it’s because of his mother that he killed. But we
can’t make that leap. For Long, the dream happened and that was the
end of it. He described it with the detachment of a reporter or jour¬
nalist. There’s nothing more to it than that, no symbolism, no con¬
nectedness, nothing. The dreams are nothing unless the dreaming
person imbues them with meaning. As a psychiatrist, I can’t endow
what Bobby Joe dreamt with meaning. That’s why you sometimes see
a psychiatrist portrayed as someone who asks questions like, “What did
that mean to you?” Had there been an emotional connection between
Bobby Joe and his dreams, it would have been completely outside any¬
thing I had seen previously. I sometimes wish it were the case, but all
data doesn’t result in a “eureka moment.”

On April 10, 1985, Long frantically wrote to me about Albert De-
Salvo, the Boston Strangler. What he wrote had nothing to do with the
serial killer from the 1960s himself, but with the movie he had seen
starring a young Tony Curtis.

I saw that movie once when I was young, again while I was doing all
the “ad Rapes,” on TV.

The second time I saw it. It was the most scary fucking movie I
ever saw. It was like watching ME in action. No, I hadn’t killed any¬
one up until then, but when he was doing the things, grabbing the
women, I could see on his face the way I felt when I did it.

One I’ll never forget was a blond he had from behind with his
hand over her mouth. His face [Tony Curtis] was a mirror. He’s an
actor, but he had a grasp of it through his face ... It hypnotized me.

I’ll never forget it. He was saying—No, not again! You’d have to see it
to believe it, or understand it. I saw, and understood. It scared me. But

Bobby Joe Longs Letters and Dreams | 165

I thought, no way! This guy killed. I don’t. I’m not like that. I could
never kill anyone. I have more control than that.

I remember him tying one to a bed and she started fighting. I had
been through the same thing. I knew how the guy felt. Like a mirror,

I swear.

Would absorbing the violence he saw in entertainment lead Long
to murder? Violence in movies has become a favorite subject in the
media when incidents on film or in video games are described in cases
before the courts as leading people to kill. A group called the Lion &
Lamb Project makes it their mission to eliminate violence in enter¬
tainment because they believe seeing violence leads kids to violence.
But unless the person committing the crime is susceptible or impaired,
such as someone who’s severely or profoundly retarded or if the person
is reliving what he sees, it won’t have an impact. Movie-initiated vio¬
lence is rarer than people often presume. So Long may have had the
flash of a moment from a scene during killing, but the movie or the
scene or the moment from the scene didn’t lead him to kill. Yet I think
there was something in Long that wanted to believe that the violence
he saw in the movie led him to kill. While I think a lot of today’s en¬
tertainment goes too far, I don’t think that televised entertainment or
movies in theaters lead all people to real-life violence. Despite a
plethora of theories and conjectures, there’s just no real proof of the
connection.

Long constantly complained about his once-injured head and the
way it felt. It was not an ache exactly; if Long was to be believed, the
formerly injured part had a kind of life of its own. Long wrote to me
about his feelings, and of a mysterious woman called Barbara, whose
acquaintance he could never later recall:

Even when its “normal” or what I’d call normal, “now.” It’s not like I
used to feel. Used to be I never felt anything in my head unless I had
a headache or something. Now I always feel the left side, it varies only
in the way it feels. “Normal” for now, it just feels like its moving from
time to time. It sounds weird but the rt. Side doesn’t feel that way only

166 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

the left. Its like if I sit here now, and look around, move my eyes rad¬
ically from one side to another, or even close them and concentrate, I
can feel it on the left side. Theres no pain, but a feeling in my brain
that’s absent from the right side. . . .

When I have the disoriented, confused, feelings, it’s different. It’s
more like a blank feeling. Hard to concentrate, sometimes just hard to
think at all. Cant organize my thoughts, cant read, its hard to even
carry on a good conversation. Its like someone just busted me in the
head real good. No pain, but slightly dizzy and disoriented. I feel like
that right now. Even I notice it in my relating to people I talk to.
Sometimes, like today, its hard to talk about anything meaningful, or
deep.

Yes, Bobby Joe had had a head injury. But there was nothing in any
doctor’s examinations that said he had severe brain damage. Still, there
is something about serial killers that leads them to complain about
imagined illnesses. John Wayne Gacy claimed he had leukemia.
Richard Macek felt he had a number of illnesses. I believe all this com¬
plaining is just a symptom of the serial killer disease. This kind of
hypochondria is a disease, a manifestation of what a person may be
feeling when they can’t put that feeling into words. It’s like a four-year-
old who cuts his finger and thinks he’s going to bleed to death. Of
course, he isn’t going to.

Long said that something in his head and even in his body changed
when someone close to him, in this case, his former wife, did him
wrong.

When Cindy lies to me, it makes my thought processes stop, I get
mad, I hurt in my head, chest, everywhere. It’s a feeling I’ve had with
three people in my life: Cindy, Mother, and Barbara. All the same feel¬
ing, and I can’t describe it better than “disoriented.” I probably
couldn’t write my name at the time. It’s a sick, terrible feeling, I hate
it, it makes me feel totally helpless, and I hate that too. . . . it’s frus¬
trating, furiating.

Bobby Joe Long’s Letters and Dreams | 167

The feeling that Long had is a little like the first feeling a worker
endures when he’s fired from his job or that sick feeling a lover suffers
when getting dumped. The feeling is physical, like a combination of
panic and the symptoms of a stomach flu. But what must be under¬
scored is that it’s only a little like those feelings. Long’s reaction was so
much bigger. He suffered an all-body attack that he could not halt or
control. A serial killer’s reaction to what he perceives as a problem is al¬
ways on this kind of physical level, just like the all-physical reaction of
an infant to stimuli.

And who was the mysterious Barbara that he mentions in the let¬
ter? He indicates she was important, but I found no reference to her
ever again, not in any way, shape, or form. It’s almost as if she were a
passing mirage. She was not a fantasy or hallucination, but she was
similar to part memories that people have. For a moment it looks like
a substantial clue to something, yet it’s nothing but smoke. I asked
Bobby Joe later, What are you talking about regarding this Barbara
person? He’d ask, “What are you talking about?” as if he’d never heard
of her before.

Long wrote more about his thought processes, about the feeling he
had when hitting his wife, Cindy.

One time I was on the edge with Cindy. It scared the hell out of me.
Another minute and I could have killed her. If her lip hadn’t bled like
it did, and made me see I was hurting her, my life, my baby, and I was
ready to kill her, it just flat scared me. But then there were a couple of
times like that with her.

More specifically, what was the feeling he had?

It’s similar to before I used to get into a fight, or just before I’d bust
somebodys face. The anger. The blank thought. Its like I was void of
thought. Like I left for a little while, then came back after. That’s how
it pretty much was with the girls, with the rapes too, now that I think
of it. It was all encompassing, nothing else mattered. Just the target!

168 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Like the fights, or the walls I kicked down, nothing else existed, or
things I busted, nothing else existed, I had no other thought. Just the
target.

No thought. Void of thought. Thought-less. A target. A thing. An
object. The victims were dehumanized, as we have seen before. They
were things that could be dismissed and even killed because they
weren’t human to Long.

Sometimes, Long said his head began to feel less tethered to his
body. “The walls are still moving, and even when sitting still, it seems
my head is moving.” It was one of the difficulties with which I felt
Bobby Joe himself had to deal. I told him he had trouble with distin¬
guishing reality from nonreality. His mind was setting a perception of
how things felt, and that wasn’t necessarily the way that they really
were. Basically, I told him he “needed to focus” so that we could work
together to prepare for his case.

Then Long began to write to me only in capital letters. It was at this
point that his letters about dreams stopped completely. I asked Bobby
more than once why he changed and why the dreams stopped, but
there were no answers, only the continued “shouts” of capital letters, as
though he needed to get my attention.

Bobby Joe was increasingly confused, angrily confused, writing,

ITS NOT A GOOD FEELING TO KNOW MY LIFE IS OVER.

TO KNOW THAT AT THE VERY BEST I’LL BE LOCKED UP
LIKE AN ANIMAL THE REST OF MY LIFE. ALL BECAUSE 7
KILLED A BUNCH OF SLUTS AND WHORES AND I DON’T
EVEN KNOW—WHY?

“What do you think?” Bobby often asked after posing a reason for
his killing. It was almost as if he was trying to lead me to think, Well,
this line might work in court in an insanity defense.

Even though he wasn’t completely honest, Bobby Joe Long had
done his best to open up to me. But what was disappointing was the
way my work was treated by Long’s defense team. After speaking to

Bobby Joe Longs Letters and Dreams | 169

Long, I felt there might be reason to believe the murderer was med¬
ically insane when he committed the crimes. After the long and exact¬
ing process of interviewing him and analyzing his letters, I determined
his psychological state of mind during the murders. And I agreed to
testify in the defense of Bobby Joe Long and appear at the murder trial
of Virginia Johnson, his seventh victim. And then I wasn’t paid. Be¬
cause his legal team had begun to add more and more psychiatrists to
the team, some of whom I thought lacked the necessary credentials,
and because I wasn’t sure Long’s legal team could really do the job, I
opted out. I had weighed the pros and cons. To me, it was a simple de¬
cision borne of a distinct feeling that the legal team ultimately didn’t
know precisely how to best try the case. After various trials for murder,
Long was sentenced not to life in prison but to death row.

And there in Raiford, Florida, along with 366 others, a completely
gray-haired Bobby Joe Long sits to this day, almost twenty years after
his crimes, still dreaming of a freedom that will never come, of death
that will indeed become reality sooner rather than later. But as my
work with Bobby Joe Long wound down, the strange anger he had for
his mother, Louella, made me look harder at the ties that bind serial
killers to their famililes.

TEN

SERIAL KILLERS AND
THEIR fAMILIES

B ringing a new life into the world is a weighty, awesome respon¬
sibility. Some people say you feel that responsibility to the mar¬
row, but in a way, I feel it right down to the genes, at the level of the
very building blocks of life itself. I consider the child’s health: will he
be sickly or healthy? Will he be emotionally stable? How do I protect
him from the worst in the world without sheltering him from all the
goodness? How do I teach him, nurture him, bring him up as a pro¬
ductive, caring member of a family in particular and of society in gen¬
eral? The questions I asked myself were endless.

Because of the horrific nature of serial killers, I have protected my
own children from information about them. They have been kept out
of the loop, and the subject material that you have read in this book
has never been discussed in any way with them. They do know I have
been on television, and that I do talk about people who hurt others,
but it was not until our oldest child was in seventh grade that he knew
I had spoken to John Gacy. This came from a friend of his who asked
him about a TV show he had seen in which I talked about Gacy and
others. I explained to my son and his friends that I am a “talking doc¬
tor,” that I work with kids and adolescents. I keep my professional life

172 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

as separate from them as is possible. And they rarely see me on televi¬
sion. TV in our house is not restricted per se, but my two sons are so
busy with school, sports, and other activities that Friends or SpongeBob
are afterthoughts.

Some of our friends think that I am too restrictive when I say I feel
it is not necessary for kids to know everything about their parents’
lives. This may be an old-fashioned idea, but kids need to be kids in
their developmental phases. I feel the boundaries we have laid down
have given my kids a sense of safety. There are so many examples of
how we have failed our children because we were afraid to put limits
on them, or failed to tell them not to do something because we wanted
them to like us or to be their pal. Kids do not learn by osmosis, they
learn by our being role models and by our active teaching. It is not es¬
sential for my children to know everything, especially about the vio¬
lence and evil with which I deal, because it can be so pervasive.

I’ve certainly had an unusual perspective on the worst that parents
can go through. From the devastated families of victims to the shocked
parents and families of the serial killers in society, what I’ve seen is never
a pretty picture. The guilt, shame, and denial of Marion Gacy, the
mother of John, was only the tip of the iceberg. Other parents too ex¬
perience a range of emotions about their ill-fated children, all dreadful,
all sorrowful, all ultimately deadening of the spirit. And it is not only
the parents who experience such wrenching emotions. It deeply affects
the brothers and sisters, and the mournful, angry wives and the serial
killer’s children as well. You can see it by what’s not said by the victims’
children and wives. They usually won’t talk to me because they’re over¬
wrought. And if I do eventually make contact, I ’ll often find on my next
attempt that the phone number is disconnected and the family has
moved away. One of the great mysteries of researching serial killers is
how the families of the victims deal with their pain over time.

Graham Greene once wrote that “there is a moment in childhood
when a door opens and lets the future in.” As I’ve mentioned before, I
believe there is something that happens in the earliest life of a baby that
sets the stage for his future as a serial killer. At least there is something
there that indicates the child will not be whole. It’s difficult for parents

Serial Killers and Their Families

173

to recognize this moment, so involved are they in the day-to-day ac¬
tivities of raising a family and earning a living. So it’s no fault of their
own that they often can’t see it.

If it’s true that a door opens in childhood to let destiny and free will
lead the way, it’s also true that a door closes on many dreams for the
future when a mother and father begin to realize they have spawned a
serial killer.

Then the parents sometimes can be painfully unpleasant to deal
with. In 1985, Bobby Joe Long’s defense team had asked me to attend
his pretrial hearing. I stood outside the Dade City, Florida, courtroom,
a nondescript building in a small town about half an hour outside of
Tampa. It was a long day in a tiny, ugly courtroom, and I really needed
the brief break the court had given us. As I breathed in the humid
Florida air and relaxed for a moment, looking at the few tropical flow¬
ers placed outside, I felt someone approaching.

I looked up to find myself confronted by Joe and Louella Long,
Bobby Joe’s parents. It was instantly clear that they wanted to lash out
at someone, anyone who had anything to do with their son’s case. They
were angry, boiling, and they needed to vent.

At the hearing, they had heard things about their son that went com¬
pletely against what they believed about him. They had not merely heard
about some of the unsavory details of his ghastly crimes, but they had
also heard from me that in my psychiatric sessions with him in his jail
cell, Bobby Joe had said he disliked his parents and his upbringing.

During the break, Louella watched a female television news re¬
porter begin her story by saying that it was Bobby Joe Long’s upbring¬
ing, particularly his lack of love from his mother, that led him to future
life of rape and murder. Later Louella would say that she was so furi¬
ous on hearing the reporter’s words that she wanted to slap her. Instead
of going after the reporter (who would have put it on the local news),
Louella and Joe took it out on me.

The divorced couple, bonded by a firm disbelief regarding their
only son’s crimes, was livid. Joe, a tall man, was bending over and in
my face, angrily taking me to task. They felt far too close for comfort,
and it was almost like being mugged.

174 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“We did the best we could with our son!” shouted Louella.

Joe got even closer to me than he had been. “You’re making it look
like we weren’t good parents.” He had managed to intimidate me. And
I don’t intimidate easily.

The confrontation had escalated in the blink of an eye, and I felt I
was being pounced on. I was the enemy. If I didn’t say something im¬
mediately, he’d be close to me as paint on canvas. At that moment, I
wasn’t sure if he himself would become violent. It’s dark, I thought to
myself. It felt like overwhelming darkness, like a shroud had been
tossed over us. The Longs didn’t believe their son had done anything
wrong, regardless of what they heard in the courtroom. They must
have thought, If only this woman had understood that their son
couldn’t have done this, then their son wouldn’t have been in the mess
he was in.

I realized that both parents were under a great deal of stress, but I
was working to help, not hurt, Bobby Joe Long. Anger helped none of
us. I said more than once that I was working “for Bobby and not
against him.”

They weren’t having it. I made every effort to try to explain. “It is
not me personally who is saying these things. This is what Bobby Joe
said to me when I evaluated him. We are all trying to help him. He is
not going to go free, you understand that, don’t you? But what the
lawyers are doing at this hearing is to try to get him a life sentence. And
they’ll continue that every step of the way. He’ll be behind bars, but
he’ll have his life.”

It all seemed to fall on deaf ears, though. I did not need to fight
with the Longs; I needed their help. I needed details about Bobby Joe’s
life as a child, teen, and young adult, along with a clear picture of the
lives of Louella and Joe. It was indeed a tightrope to walk; I needed in¬
formation from them, yet I had to stand my ground as a doctor. I
wouldn’t be bullied by them, and the tete-a-tete ended in a kind of
standoff.

Even before the hearing, on March 11, 1985, I sent the Longs a let¬
ter asking them to complete a lengthy child history document so that
I could better assess Bobby Joe. On April 15, I sent another reminder

Serial Killers and Their Families | 175

letter, since neither Joe nor Louella had taken the time to post the es¬
sential information. It wasn’t until May 3 that Joe returned his survey,
but it was incomplete, lacking most information on the family medical
history as well as other more minor facts like birth dates and occupa¬
tions. Either they had forgotten or they didn’t really want to know how
Bobby Joe came to become what the newspapers in the Tampa area
were calling a shameless monster who had killed nine women. I kept
after them, though, trying to win their trust, as it was crucial to the re¬
search that was needed for Bobby Joe Long’s upcoming trial. It meant
writing a series of impassioned, single-spaced, three-page letters, but
eventually I won them over.

Joe Long, an earnest man who was permanently injured while
working in a paper mill, said he didn’t see anything wrong with Bobby
Joe throughout his son’s childhood. But he and Louella separated be¬
fore Bobby was a year old. The only odd incident he could recall from
Bobby’s childhood was that “Bobby was scared of snow and a snow¬
storm. He was young and flying here [from Florida to West Virginia]
alone. Due to a very bad snowstorm, his flight was delayed in Cincin¬
nati, Ohio, where he was put up in a hotel room alone all night.” Joe
did go on to say that his mother had had “seizures for as long as I can
recall. Over a long period of time she has been tested by several doc¬
tors and they could never determine what caused them.” Joe described
these episodes as “she will slap her chest and stomp her feet and say
there is a hot smothering sensation that overcomes her. There are times
that she will pass out for a few seconds. . . . She is then perfectly nor¬
mal.” He also mentioned that his brother suffered from a “deep de¬
pression. During that time of the brother’s illness his father-in-law was
slowly dying of cancer.” This family history really had nothing to do
with the killings that Bobby Joe committed in the Tampa area. It’s true
that Bobby Joe’s grandmother had seizures. It’s true that Bobby Joe’s
uncle felt depressed. But nothing linked these illnesses to serial killing,
so they were unrelated to Bobby Joe’s problems. As the surgeons fre¬
quently say, “True, true, but unrelated.” There were no signs that
Bobby Joe had any kind of seizures or any deep depressions, either, and
no signs of inheriting any type of genetic illness.

176 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Though Joe was adamant in saying that his son had no health prob¬
lems, he did reveal that the boy failed the first grade, “due to his chang¬
ing school and that perhaps he was too young to become interested.”
Later, Bobby Joe also had trouble with insubordination in the armed
forces at Homestead Air Force Base near Miami, Florida. He received
a dishonorable discharge (which was later changed to an honorable dis¬
charge).

It was while in the Army that Bobby Joe suffered what his father
called “the accident.” To him, it was such a significant injury that he
never even referred to the details of “the accident” in a many-paged
handwritten letter to me. It was as if the result of the accident was too
monumental to comprehend. Bobby Joe suffered severe trauma when
his motorcycle was hit by a car and he was thrown forty feet from the
vehicle, landing on his head (which was somewhat protected by a hel¬
met). Joe said that it was after the accident that life changed for Bobby,
and he offered proof in the form of a doctors statement from the
armed forces saying that Bobby Joe had indeed suffered brain damage
resulting from the crash.

There are a few people who believe there is a direct link between se¬
rial killing and brain trauma. Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, in her book
Guilty by Reason of Insanity, writes that a brain injury through accident
or through physical abuse is evident in some of our most vicious
killers. As an example, she writes about Arthur Shawcross, a vile mur¬
derer whom I have profiled. Shawcross took the lives of eleven women
not far from the Upstate New York community of Rochester in the late
1980s. The sight of the mutilated bodies shocked the hunters and po¬
licemen who found them in and around the bucolic Genesee River
Gorge. When more information became available, it was learned that
with a knife, Shawcross removed and ate some of his victims’ vaginas
during his crimes. While these facts will hold some interest for fans of
true-crime books, I had no real eureka moments with Shawcross or
with police or lawyers during the case.

What engages me is this. Dr. Lewis states that under hypnosis,
Shawcross told bits and pieces of his crimes, so Lewis theorized that he
suffered incomplete temporal lobe seizures that wreaked havoc with his

Serial Killers and Their Families

177

memory. She believed that the seizures occurred only when Shawcross
was alone with the women, most of whom were prostitutes. After por¬
ing over the results of an MRI, she also found a cyst growing at the
base of Shawcross’s temporal lobe. Her partner, Jonathan Pincus, also
found “two straight little scars” on both temporal lobes. While these
are important findings, they are just not enough to prove that the
growth precipitated or even influenced his behavior. What she hadn’t
proven was that one thing led to the other. That’s not to say she was
wrong. She needed to study the patient more fully, and more fully
means attaching him to a machine that studies the brain while he is
carrying on normal daily activities. Certainly, Dr. Lewis needed to ex¬
amine more than one person who had a brain cyst and who murdered
in a serial fashion. As I’ve detailed, John Wayne Gacy’s brain had no
tumors or cysts whatsoever. I do not believe brain trauma caused
Arthur Shawcross to kill and I don’t believe it caused Bobby Joe Long
to kill. Again, it’s true; true, but unrelated.

Letters from Bobby Joe’s mother were more emotional and detailed
than those from his father. Despite her various jobs as a bartender, a
carhop, and a barmaid, Louella was an old-fashioned gal at heart. She
claimed she drank alcohol fewer than fifty times in her forty-six years
and that she never touched a beer or hard liquor. She said she preferred
buttermilk.

She admitted that she had married far too early, so early that she
didn’t know how babies were born. Like many small-town girls of the
time, she thought children “came out of the navel.” After her father
was killed in an on-the-job accident, Louella and her mother lived in
what she frankly described as “a shack.” Louella wrote, “Mom was a
good person morally, but she didn’t know how to raise children, and so
we didn’t know how to raise children (either).”

It was clear that Louella cared dearly about her only son, and the
following letter is indicative of her doting nature. Louella wrote;

Son,

Do you realize, Bob, that until the other night. I’d never heard you

talk dirty in your life. It ripped me to shreds. Have you become so

178 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

hardened, son, that you just don’t care anymore. Don’t you know that
I have planned and thought hundreds of times how I could get you
out of there? I find myself doing this and I think. What’s wrong with
me, am I really planning this? Am I crazy? There’s no way I could get
you out and then I think more about it and I know I wouldn’t want
you out right now—in the shape you’re in. Son, what’s happened to
you?... I remember your voice on the phone the last 2 or 3 times be¬
fore all this happened. It’s so unreal. I guess I’ve never really convinced
myself you could’ve done these things—even though I know you did.

It’s just so impossible, seeing you with people and living with you, and
knowing how you were with your children. I can still see you so many
times combing Chris’ hair for him, helping him put on his shoes and
socks, brushing Bobby Joe’s hair. Washing and drying the laundry.
Folding their little clothes so carefully and putting them away. Taking
them out with the dog and going to the lake. You were such an ordi¬
nary kind of person—what happened to him. Oh, son, don’t let your¬
self become so hardened [that] no one can reach you. Be kind to
people. Search for the good in them. You’ll find more people wanting
to help you. . . . Anything I ever did that hurt you or humiliated you,

I’m so sorry for. I’m so sorry for everything I didn’t do that I should
have, and things I did that I shouldn’t have.

Bobby Joe Long himself said he didn’t remember enjoying all that
much happiness with his mother, and on hearing this, Louella was
aghast. She wrote about her feelings as if she had been stabbed through
the heart.

I don’t see how Bob could have blocked out every happy thing we did
in our lives. The first 6 or 8 years we were in Fla., we went everywhere
together. I have movies and photographs from all those places—mon¬
key jungle, parrot jungle, seaquarium, porpoise show in the keys,
Daytona, Spook Hill, and hundreds of pictures of many different days
each year at the beaches. When he was small, we spent all our time to¬
gether. ... I never brought a man home and “kicked Bob out of bed.”

We lived in decent people’s homes and I had to enter that home and

Serial Killers and Their Families

179

come out of that home and I did not bring men home, as it was told
at the last trial.

Whether Louella Long was telling mistruths or whether time led
her to recall only good things doesn’t really matter. Although she wasn’t
telling the whole story, as we’ll soon see, nothing Louella did as a sin¬
gle mother bringing up her child made Bobby into the killer he be¬
came. To some, that may sound obvious, but it needs to be said
because so many parents resort to self-blame, or are blamed by others
for the serial murders of their child.

Millions of children are the products of terribly broken homes, and
while they may harbor some emotional scars, they don’t resort to the
odious crimes for which Bobby Joe Long was tried. Whether or not
Louella once asked Bobby to leave her bed so she could have sex with
a boyfriend has no bearing on the crimes he committed later in life. As
he murdered, he was never trying to lay retribution upon a society or
a mother that he felt had dealt him a horrible childhood. However,
Louella’s overwrought emotions were indicative of the bottomless guilt
and hostility a parent feels when her child commits the most morally
and ethically repugnant crime of all. . . over and over again. Some par¬
ents and families never get over the weight of it all, condemning them¬
selves to wallow in a past of shock and sorrow, constantly reliving the
precise moments when they heard their son was accused. They pore
over their past lives with their child, searching for clues as to where
they went wrong. It’s almost a twilight zone of regret, a self-made pur¬
gatory from which they never emerge whole and unscathed.

Louella (as well as Joe) was indeed suspicious of me early on, ques¬
tioning my motives, as though I were working against Bobby Joe. But
as I gained Louella’s confidence, she began to open up, most specifi¬
cally in a long missive in October of 1985. In the nineteen-page letter,
handwritten and single spaced on legal-size paper, Louella detailed a
few peculiarities in Bobby Joe Long’s childhood that bear mentioning.

Louella’s mother, Mamie, told her that “a couple of times she found
him in the closet hiding and he told her something was after him and
he was scared to come out. Naturally, she stayed with him ’til he went

180 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

to sleep, I never knew of him being afraid.” But in a letter to me dated
November 30, 1985, Mamie wrote from her home in Shenandoah,
Georgia,

When Bobby was little and had to be by his self, he would hide in the
closet with his ball bat crying his eyes out. Said Big Eyes was out to
get him. I begged his Mom to get him help but she said she couldn’t
and then just before this [Bobby’s crimes] happened, I told her their
was something bad wrong with him. And her and Joe just would not
listen. He acted like his mind was so troubled and didn’t even look like
his self. I ask God to please watch over him and give the judges the
mind to not give him the chair.

Who was Big Eyes? Most monsters imagined are fully formed, not
disembodied. Children see the monster under the bed, a shadowy fig¬
ure, but a figure with a body nonetheless. But what Bobby Joe saw gen¬
erally is a symptom that appears with people who fear being watched,
kind of an early paranoia. Serial killers are suspicious folk, even before
police are watching them. What Bobby Joe saw was an example of a
very primitive psychological state, as though he had not moved emo¬
tionally from the earliest stages of infancy. Babies don’t initially see
you; they see shapes, forms, undefined types of pieces that lack whole¬
ness. They see parts. It hit me like lightning striking. Like other serial
killers I had profiled and interviewed, Long had never matured emo¬
tionally beyond infancy.

Additionally, Louella had written to me about a hormone imbalance
that made him appear as though he had breasts like a woman. Called
gynecomastia, it’s a fairly common anomaly caused by either excess fat
or glandular tissue. It can be somewhat embarrassing, since it gives the
chest area a decidedly female contour. Louella gave a lot of thought to
Bobby’s dilemma, ultimately deciding on surgery. Said Louella, “A doc¬
tor gave him 6 or 7 shots hoping to decrease his chest, but it did noth¬
ing, so they suggested surgery. It wasn’t that bad, but bad enough that
it made him very self-conscious about his shirts and the doctor said for
his mental sake, we should have the fatty tissue removed.”

Serial Killers and Their Families

181

She also said she hadn’t seen “Bob cry since he was hit by the car
when he was 7 years old, except when the kids tormented him at
school about his teeth protruding so much.” There were also periods
when “he was so cold and indifferent—days at a time.”

Like many fifteen-year-olds, Bobby hid some pornography from his
mother. But she also discovered his curiosity went far beyond photo¬
graphs. “There were holes in the bathroom and in my closet which ad¬
joined his (at the top as a separate compartment with sliding doors and
he’d made a hole in his & could look directly into my dressing table
mirror & see the entire room. I don’t know how many years it had
been there.” Louella thought that Bobby may have played the voyeur
and watched her with a boyfriend who lived with the two briefly. “Bob
hated his guts. They had a terrible fight one night (over the placement
of some shoes in the living room) ... It was a bloody mess. I couldn’t
believe the hatred in Bob. He bloodied Jim’s nose and beat him pretty
pitifully ... I don’t know if Bob had watched us make love through
that hole in the closet or not, but I feel in my heart he did, and that’s
why he hated Jim so much. . . . But Bob has never been able to forgive
anyone anything. Why? He’s hated my family for years & he wouldn’t
even speak to them. Why can’t he forgive people?” Again, this bound¬
less rage is the kind of reaction an emotionally immature person would
exhibit. When children see their parents having sex, children often
think one is hurting the other. Although Bobby was a teenager, he
didn’t have fully developed emotions. In fact, he never would.

According to Louella, Bobby began to imagine things that never
really happened regarding the family. “He thought I was a mean, hard
person who slapped people. Even said I slapped my sisters Luanne &
Sharon right in the face. That’s never happened in my entire life, but
he really believes it—like he believes he very nearly drowned and they
had to grab him in and resuscitate him. [But actually] he was holding
onto a raft and the lifeguard went out & got him. We were up eating
at the hot dog stand 5 minutes later.” Bobby had posted two angry let¬
ters to Louella from jail chastising her about the near drowning that
she adamantly believes had never occurred.

John Wayne Gacy’s sister Karen was not as forgiving of her brother

182 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

as Louella was of her son. Karen again and again acknowledged that
Gacy’s killings were a huge burden on her family. In early 1979, she
wrote to John,

You probably have wondered why I haven’t written, but what does one
say. I am shattered inside and out. I have not been able to function
like I did before because the nightmare is always there.

I was so proud of you, that you changed your life after Iowa [where
he was incarcerated for sodomy], and then this. Why is all I ask? Why?
Was sex that big a thing with you that you had to pick on innocent
boys and then kill them because they would tell on you. God, why?
Why didn’t you come to us for help?

My family has been torn apart by this; I only pray to God that the
kids are not affected by this. Sheri was so torn up we had to get coun¬
seling for her. I’m still under doctors care, and Mom who know what
its affects have been on her.

What in God’s name can I say to you. I am sorry I didn’t get the
chance to help you. Several times I got the feeling you wanted to tell
me something and never did. You have been sick for a long time and
I only wish I could have spotted it and helped you.

We are going to try and piece our lives together the best we can as
I know there is no way we can help you now. Only God can help you.

Mad Biter Richard Macek’s wife, Sandra, was ambivalent about the
misdeeds of her husband. She avoided going to see Macek at Central
State Hospital in Wisconsin, saying, “I really haven’t gone up to there
myself or taken the kids up to him because I get very upset. He upsets
me. He upsets them. I get all uptight. [My daughter] cries for days af¬
terwards. At first I thought I wasn’t going to make it through it, be¬
cause all I did was walk around crying.”

Unsurprisingly, she just didn’t want to believe Macek was a mur¬
derer. She went on at length about how Richard helped the neighbors,
repeatedly carrying a wheelchair-bound neighbor’s mother down the
stairs. “He even took days to make a lion costume for our daughter for
Halloween. He brought animals home for the kids. A whole

Serial Killers and Their Families

183

menagerie. I had four dogs. I had two cats. I don’t know how many
ducks. I had four birds. A tank full of fish.”

But just as I detailed at the beginning of this book, Macek could
change within seconds. Sandra related, “The day I went up to be with
him for the lie detector test—he was boiling because he told me not to
come unless I drove, and I felt I didn’t want to drive. The weather was
bad and I don’t like to drive when it gets icy. So I took a train. They
couldn’t test him because he was so fired up at me. He was mad at me
the whole day.”

Worried, I recall leaning over to Sandra while we talked at
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, saying, “I have concerns for the safety of
several people he feels have crossed him if he ever got out. Do you
think he would hurt you?”

She started by being somewhat indignant. How could he hurt her?
They were married; they had a deep bond. But then she opened up. “I’ve
never been afraid of Richard before now, and I’m not afraid of him now.
But I do want a divorce. I’ve had girlfriends say, ‘Well, how come your
husband hasn’t come around to see your new baby [who was born while
Richard was in jail]?’ I just say ‘I don’t know. He’s in California some¬
where.’ I can’t handle it any other way. If they ask about the Macek who’s
in jail, I say, ‘I don’t know who that is. Maybe it’s a relative of Richard’s
family, but I don’t know.’ That’s why I want to have my name changed.
I don’t want it to be Macek anymore. I don’t want my kids to go through
any more questions about their father being a murderer.”

I can only imagine the trauma, the distressing combination of em¬
barrassment and sadness, that a child can go through when harassed by
other children about their father’s murdering ways. They have to think
about it every day of their lives. If they meet anybody new, the ques¬
tions, formerly innocuous but now dire, inevitably come up. The in¬
nocent questions people ask when first meeting someone become dark
and burdensome to answer. They echo loudly and persistently: How
many brothers and sisters do you have? What are they like? Where’s
your family from? What do they do? Do you confess that your father
had killed so mercilessly and fiercely? Never. You can only do one
thing. You lie. You have to.

184 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

And imagine the ordeal of the divorced mother of the child, sitting
alone at night at the kitchen table after everyone has gone to bed, try¬
ing desperately to make sense of something that makes no sense at all.
Her friends have disappeared. They’ll have nothing to do with her. If
she testified for her spouse, she was immediately branded: she was as
bad as he was. Kinship and loyalty are not supposed to exist with some¬
one who has committed crimes so grievous as serial killing.

Friends and acquaintances sense that the family must have known
that the killings were going on; therefore, the parents are guilty too.
They have spawned this monster, and they must pay a price. Do
townspeople march up to their houses with burning torches and raised
pitchforks and scream “You grew a killer!” similar to the old Franken¬
stein movie? No. But there are more subtle and no less hurtful re¬
sponses, like being shunned. If you haven’t left town before the
neighbors turn against you, you probably will when they do.

After thinking about all these things and more, Louella wished she
could change not only history but also everything in her life. She had de¬
scribed herself as an “outsider—always aching for someone to love me”
and had said that her life as a child was “a very scary time,” for her and
her sisters; as a result, they “suffered from colitis [the intestinal ailment]
almost all our lives.” At the end of her letter Louella wrote impas-
sionedly, “It’s such a shame that we can’t live our lives over, after we’ve
smartened up and come to realize the true values of life—like our pre¬
cious children and our devotion to them & God, who gave them to us
to bring them up in the right way.” I truly wished that things had turned
out better for Louella, but history can’t be changed. Louella would even¬
tually deal with the crimes of her son, yet somewhere in her mind they
would always haunt her. It might hit her when she was making coffee or
when she looked at a family photo or when she was at the beach or when
she woke inexplicably in the middle of the night. She would be re¬
minded of Bobby. She would be reminded of a killer. And though she
shouldn’t have, some part of her would always blame herself.

On the other hand, stewing angrily in his jail cell, there was Bobby
Joe Long himself. He didn’t blame himself. He couldn’t. He had no re¬
morse at all, not one molecule of it.

ELEVEN

THE SADISM Of
ROBERT BERDELLA

V iolence and sadism of the worst sort. Some people might think I
enjoy studying it, that because I have been around violent people
like serial killers for the past thirty-five years, I take morbid pleasure from
all the evil things that humans do to one another. But that couldn’t be
further from the truth. I abhor violence, and deep down, I don’t know
why people are so brutal to one another. That’s why the crimes of Robert
Andrew Berdella Jr. literally made me sick to my stomach.

After being around Macek, Gacy, Long, and many others, I
thought I knew violence as well as I could know it. I felt that I could
function very well as a doctor and as a wife and mother even while I
was immersed in analyzing the hideous thought processes that possess
the mind of every serial killer. Yes, it’s not easy. When I’m deeply in¬
volved in a case, I’m late for dinner parties and my children’s extracur¬
ricular activities. It’s just part of the job, though I find I’m usually able
to focus on the work at hand, whether it’s interviewing a serial killer or
being a parent. But I recall that I was really thrown off-kilter by the
savagery of Robert Berdella. His crimes were so intricate, experimen¬
tal, and sadistic that they made me sick. I don’t mean that it merely dis¬
gusted me or repulsed me. It got to me, deep inside.

186 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

In a way, Robert Berdella Jr. was like the child who pulls the wings
off flies, except Berdella’s deeds were exponentially more depraved. A
boy might capture a fly with his hands or with an empty jelly jar.
When the insect is weakened, the boy might pull off its wings or stick
pins into it. When a child tortures an insect, he does it to see what hap¬
pens. He can’t hear the fly react in pain. If he could hear the insect
scream, the boy might well regret his actions.

Robert Berdella, sometimes called the Butcher of Kansas City, simply
“wanted to see what happened.” Berdella lived a handful of blocks from
Main Street in Kansas City, near historic Hyde Park, an area of beautifully
restored houses through which the original Santa Fe trail cut a swath.

But Berdella wasn’t like the proud residents who kept a neat house,
maintained their lawns, and trimmed their shrubs. His house was full
of clutter, everything from opened dog food containers to a colorful,
embroidered robe from Afghanistan that hung oddly like a painting
from his bedroom wall. This robe was likely picked from the inventory
of a business he ran at a nearby flea market. He christened this shop
Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre, and it was full of oddities like African deity masks
and books about the occult. It was from sales of objects here that the
lisping Berdella made his living.

There was once a short article about Berdella in the local paper,
about how the graduate (actually, he dropped out) of the Kansas City
Art Institute transformed his house into a gallery showcasing primitive
art from Egypt, Italy, and New Guinea. Tours, the newspaper item
said, could be arranged by appointment. I don’t think there ever were
any “tours.” And if the house was a gallery for a while, it soon became
more of a warehouse full of Berdella’s collections of weird stuff.
Berdella was a pack rat the way Ed Gein was a pack rat, and the clut¬
ter in the house grew with every passing day.

The newspaper article, however, reported nothing about the
strange goings-on inside the house. When Berdella tortured men in his
unobtrusive three-story home at 4315 Charlotte Street, he often raped
them “to see what happened.” He even stuck his finger hard into the
eye of a bound victim “to see what happened.” And those acts were just
the beginning of his coldhearted observations.

The Sadism of Robert Berdella

187

Berdella was an experimenter, but unlike even the most amateur
scientist, he conducted his experiments as rote actions only. Berdella
actually reminded me of another infamous experimenter, H. H. Mud-
gett, who killed during the Chicago World’s Fair. Both drew no
thoughtful conclusions from what they did. Certainly Berdella devel¬
oped no theories based upon the confessed killing and mutilation and
dismemberment of six men. (Actually, I believe he probably commit¬
ted a lot more murders, since it was documented that there were at
least twenty people whom he tortured, though these did not die. But
six murders were the only ones police could pin on him.) Berdella
chronicled his experiments in detailed bound diaries and in 334 Po¬
laroid photographs that police discovered in his cluttered home. They
were buried amid bric-a-brac, antiques, and curiosities, storage from
Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre.

It wasn’t inside the shop that Berdella carried out his most heinous
work. In his basement, but mainly in a second-floor bedroom, Berdella
created a rudimentary torture chamber that included a bed, piano
wire, a black velveteen rope, various animal tranquilizers, a wooden
club, needles and syringes, cucumbers, carrots, a spatula, some copper
wire, and a 7,700-volt transformer.

What he did with these tools was explained in his diaries, note¬
books with a spiral binding at the top. They were dark and difficult to
stomach, the epitome of man’s inhumanity to man. The pages of
Berdella’s journal of murder were more like a madman’s logbook than
the secret musings and intimate thoughts of a human being. The grisly
yet impassively described details made it too easy to imagine Berdella,
looming over his victims with his six-foot-two frame and thick glasses,
breathing heavily, experimenting, torturing, using, then killing. And as
I reeled from this catalog of horrors I felt not only how blessed I was
in my personal life but also a new resolve and a sense of purpose.

I looked most closely at the case of Larry Pearson, a sometime male
prostitute who Berdella kept as a bound, frightened, and tortured
hostage. He kept him not for a day and not for a week, but for six
weeks. There is a photo of Larry Pearson, snapped by Berdella, that
says so much about the torture that the killer inflicted. Lying on the

188 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

thinnest of mattresses, the twenty-year-old is tied in Berdella’s base¬
ment to a brick post, tied by his hands not with rope but with piano
wire and handcuffs. The piano wire goes around his back, under his
arms and into his mouth, tightly, so that it gags him, making him not
only unable to talk, but also unable to make just about any sound at
all, especially the sound of screaming. It is wrapped over his mouth and
behind him three or four times so that his mouth is forced open. Pear¬
son cannot close his mouth to swallow well. The wire digs not only
into his skin but also into his facial muscle.

Also in the picture, a syringe and hypodermic needle stick at an
angle just below his Adam’s apple; in case the gag and piano wire did
not work, Berdella had injected Drano into Larry Pearson’s vocal cords
so that Pearson would not scream. Pearson’s eyes were shut and puffy.
Berdella had taken a cotton swab and dabbed Drano into the victim’s
eyes as well. In the photo, he almost looks as though he is dead. But
he would live like that—and even live worse, as he was tortured
incessantly—for a month and a half.

Larry Pearson was Berdella’s fifth victim, kidnapped and bound on
Tuesday, June 23, 1987, not long after the two went to watch
Creepshow II. When the two returned to Berdella’s house, they began
drinking. Berdella said they each had “twelve to fifteen shots,” every¬
thing from vodka to schnapps. Berdella added some tranquilizers to
Larry’s drinks. Early in the evening, Berdella injected Pearson with
four shots of chlorpromazine, a potent tranquilizer somewhat like
Thorazine. Sometimes used for schizophrenia to stop the patient from
hearing voices, the drug is nicknamed “the chemical straitjacket” be¬
cause it can leave the user in a zombielike state. Like morphine, it is
also sometimes used to ease the distress of the terminally ill. It’s cer¬
tainly not supposed to be in the hands of a nonprofessional of any sort.
Yet chlorpromazine was fairly easy for Berdella to find. It is also used
as an animal tranquilizer, and it was likely that Berdella bought the
drug over the counter. And even if it wasn’t, Berdella was no stranger
to the world of drugs and to procuring them; he pled guilty to selling
amphetamines when he was a sophomore in college.

On the rare occasion when Pearson became lucid, he tried to cry

The Sadism of Robert Berdella

189

out but was unable to make more than a peep because his vocal cords
were so damaged. But he must have mulled over the many horrors of
his capture whenever his mind was clear.

Larry Pearson, a well-built, good-looking man with a thin mus¬
tache, met Berdella by chance when he stopped in to browse at Bob’s
Bazaar Bizarre. Later, when Berdella was driving along the streets of
Kansas City, he would spot Pearson walking on the street and stop to
offer him a ride. And without a thought, Pearson would get in. If the
two weren’t friends, they had become acquaintances. When Pearson
was nabbed for indecent exposure a few weeks before Berdella took
him hostage, Pearson phoned Berdella to post bond, which he did.
Once Pearson was sprung from jail, the pair rode in Berdella’s car to
Ohio to visit Robert’s family. Berdella felt it was peculiar that Pearson
would call his own mother “Mom.” After all, he had just met her.
Odder yet was the fact that later, Pearson told Berdella’s mother and
stepfather stories about picking up a woman and how they “got into
porno films together.” When the two returned to Kansas City, Pearson
moved in. He and Berdella didn’t sleep in the same bed. Instead, Pear¬
son stayed on Berdella’s couch.

Something unknown built up in Berdella during those days in
Ohio, and he felt that Pearson was exceedingly rude to his family. He
wanted to have sex with Larry, but Pearson didn’t give any indication
that he wanted it or would have accepted any overtures. Long after his
capture, when he decided to confess to avoid a death sentence, police
asked Berdella if a comment Pearson made was the trigger for his cap¬
ture.

Berdella reported that as they drove the streets of Kansas City
shortly after seeing Creepshow II, Larry said, “I used to roll queers over
in Wichita. Robbed ’em.” Berdella let this pass without much debate,
but it could have gnawed at him inside. Yet I don’t believe Pearson’s al¬
leged prejudice was the trigger that made Robert begin his capture and
torture. There was no evidence in the other murders that an emotion
like rage played a part in Berdella’s experiments. And Berdella did say
about the comment, “I guess it was the trigger. I hadn’t been thinking
about it for days before or anything ... I probably quickly formed the

190 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

opinion ‘This is somebody that no one’s going to end up missing; they
aren’t going to know where he’s at.’ ” His iffy answer seemed more like
the response of someone who wanted to please the police, and to get
the ordeal of the confession, then in its third day, over and done with.

Once Pearson was immobilized in the basement, Berdella brought
five things down the stairs: two wires, two clamps of the sort that
would be used to jump-start a stalled car, and a transformer, which he
had purchased used at the flea market, one that emitted 7,700 volts.
After sodomizing him with his finger and biting his nipple hard
enough to draw blood, he attached the clamps onto Pearson, and over
the next twelve hours, he gave Pearson a half-dozen ten- to thirty-
second jolts from his rudimentary shock machine. During this time,
he also whipped him, clubbed him, shoved a carrot into his anus, and
then brutally raped him.

There were photos too of Pearson receiving the abhorrent electrical
shocks. The victim would lurch forward, even though he was con¬
strained so well that he shouldn’t have been able to move. The look in
his protruding eyes, eyes that looked ready to leave their sockets, was
not one of fear so much as it was of pain and surprise. And there
was Berdella, lisping away, commanding Pearson to keep quiet, all the
while snapping photographic records of the poor man, Polaroids that
he would later use to masturbate.

Though he was often drugged, some part of Pearson was lucid enough
to understand that he was to be slave to Berdella’s master. He was
brought out to do his job and nothing more, and his job was to satisfy
Berdella. Because he minded Berdella’s commands for weeks, Robert
moved the man upstairs to a bedroom. Berdella would sit and watch
television with Pearson chained up next to him in bed, but Pearson
wasn’t allowed to comment or to talk or to make any noise whatsoever.

After five weeks, Berdella presumed that his slave was completely
under his control. On Wednesday, August 5, Berdella made Pearson
perform oral sex on him. At that point, perhaps fueled by hope for es¬
cape and an anger that had boiled over despite Berdella’s efforts to tame
him as though he were a wild animal, Pearson fought back.

“I’m not going to be treated this way anymore!” he cried, according

The Sadism of Robert Berdella

191

to Berdella. In one swift moment, Pearson bit Berdella so hard, he
nearly severed his penis. It was then that Pearson had his chance to es¬
cape. I’m positively sure the reason Pearson stayed in the room wasn’t
due to what Berdella theorized when he said, “I think more than any¬
thing else he bit me because he wanted attention.” Was Pearson too
afraid or too weak to leave? It’s more complex than that. I don’t believe
Larry Pearson could make a choice to escape. There is the kind of per¬
son who has developed a victim mentality, and the unthinkable hap¬
pens to him because he gets to the point where he no longer feels he
has the free will to escape. Pearson may have thought for a moment he
could make a run for it but then thought better of it.

Berdella then injected him with acepromazine, an animal tranquil¬
izer, and began thrashing Pearson with part of a tree limb. It was thick,
splitting Pearson’s lip and knocking him out. Then Berdella, oozing a
lot of blood from Pearson’s bite, drove himself to the hospital. Upon
examining him, doctors informed Berdella that he required immediate
hospitalization, at least for a couple of days.

“I have to go home first to leave some food for my dogs,” worried
Berdella as he spoke to the doctor. “But then I’ll come back.”

Once home, Berdella looked in on the condition of Larry Pearson.
He saw that Larry’s face looked as though it had been put through a
meat grinder. Berdella pulled a plastic bag over Pearson’s head, secured
it tightly, and went to feed the dogs. There’s a kind of profiler who has
studied behavioral science who believes that serial killers torture and
kill dogs and cats in addition to humans and that torturing animals is
a precursor to killing human beings. But I have not seen this to be true.
Serial killers like Berdella can have pets, and they dote on them and
treat them well—much better than their victims.

Berdella returned to see that the plastic bag had no more air and
that his slave had expired after forty-three days of unthinkable torture.
Without a twinge of human emotion, he turned away, locked up his
house, and took a cab to the hospital. After an operation, he returned
to the house on Friday, took a safety razor and boning knife to Pear¬
son, and removed his internal organs and drained his blood. Because
he was weak from the operation and still wearing a catheter, it took

192 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

him two days to dispose of the body. Berdella used a chain saw to cut
it up, then placed the body parts in dog food bags and then in plastic
garbage bags. He cut off Pearson’s head, some vertebrae still attached,
wrapped it in a trash bag, and placed it in a freezer as a kind of keep¬
sake. On Sunday night, he took the rest of the garbage bags and
dragged them onto the street for sanitation workers to pick up on
Monday. In the twilight on August 7, he retrieved the head from the
freezer, dug up the head of another victim from his yard, and dropped
Pearson’s head in the same hole. He placed the other head in an empty,
five-gallon pickle container and filled it with water to remove dirt and
the remaining rotting skin and placed the container in one of the clos¬
ets in his house. Why did he choose to do this? It was more like a rep¬
etition behavior than anything else. In a twisted way, it was kind of like
planting a garden. Berdella may have thought, Well, last year I put cu¬
cumbers here, so I’ll do the same thing this year.

Police suspected and even expected a much grander plan for dis¬
posal of the bodies. They deduced that Berdella would try to hide them
carefully or in a place that would be unnoticed. To help solve the case,
they brought in from Texas a dog called Junior along with his trainer,
Sergeant Billy Smith, to search the backyard after they’d already found
Pearson’s skull. Smith, who had the words LOVE and EhATE tattooed
on his knuckles, had a plastic container of human flesh which he had
the dog whiff to get him going for the hunt. At first, Junior found
nothing. Then he began to growl and Sergeant Billy Smith said, “Ju¬
nior smells death. The smell of death is strong around here.” The dog
began barking near Berdella’s chimney and at the door of an old tool
shed. Upon digging, the police did find some teeth . . . dentures dis¬
posed of by previous occupants of the house.

They even searched various nearby farms where Berdella traveled to
visit friends. They did detect a body on one of the farms. But on closer
examination, it was the body of a cow. The police never imagined it
was as simple as it was; Berdella just threw the bodies out as trash. To
him, it was just garbage. What do you do when you’re done with your
experiment? You dispose of it; you throw it away. Berdella murdered
his other victims in a similar fashion, although with only one other

The Sadism of Robert Berdella

193

person did he choose to keep the skull. One might ask why he kept the
skulls. Were they totems, souvenirs, or something darker and deeper to
Berdella? The simple fact is that I don’t know. I’ve certainly asked
Berdella and all of them over and over again. But serial murderers
themselves can’t explain these actions. And I cannot venture a guess or
a theory when there isn’t enough data to lead me there.

Berdella might never have been caught by police (who, as is usually
the case, did not believe that the disappearance of drifters was a prior¬
ity), but one of those whom he preyed upon escaped. The wily nature
of his last slave, Chris Bryson, proved too much for Berdella. When
Berdella left the house to attend to errands, Bryson, using matches left
near his bed, burnt through the four ropes that bound him. Com¬
pletely unclothed, Bryson then leapt from the second-floor window
and ran to a neighbor for help. When Berdella returned home in his
Toyota Tercel on the day before Easter 1988, police were camped out,
waiting for him.

As the police took him away, the so-called butcher of Kansas City
kept repeating, “This is not right. This is not right.” He could not be¬
lieve he had been caught. Moreover, he did not believe he had done
anything wrong.

While in Kansas City for a conference for the Midwest Chapter of the
American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in the spring of 1988, I
spoke to Kansas City Star journalist Tom Jackman, who was contem¬
plating writing a book about Berdella. When I met with him at my
hotel, it was clear that the serial killer’s doings had rocked the city and
frightened many of its 1.5 million residents. It was no help to the col¬
lective soul of the city that television personality Geraldo Rivera had
swooped down and interviewed a woman who claimed that Berdella was
a Satanist and that she had seen him attend various Satanist gatherings.

Jackman helped to arrange my face-to-face contacts with the jailed
killer so that I could learn more about his mind. I was interested in the
ritual experimentation that Berdella performed on each of his six
known victims, and Berdella was happy to talk. After all, he was in jail
for life and had nothing better to do with the forty hours we talked.

194 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Berdella spoke to me wearing paper prison clothes and thongs on
his feet. (Shoelaces have long been banned, because they possibly could
be used as a weapon or in a suicide attempt.)

“Did you do all those crimes they accused you of?” I asked.

“Of course. I have already confessed to them.”

He seemed somewhat annoyed, as though he felt I wasn’t familiar
with his case. But I had read the transcripts of his three-day, 715-page
confession along with many other documents about him. I also had all
of his school reports, most of which pegged him as a really good stu¬
dent who earned As and Bs without much effort. He was not unlike
most serial killers in that regard. Many have IQs that are above aver¬
age, though none are geniuses. Still, one English teacher wrote, “Very
argumentative, sarcastic. Insists on his own way.” And, of course, I had
read those eerie Berdella torture diaries, written hastily amid the ex¬
citement of his experiments. He scrawled all of the words in capital let¬
ters, as though the writer himself screamed for attention, even though
his words were abbreviated. He used “FRT FK” to abbreviate “front
fuck,” for instance. Beyond being perturbed at what he perceived as
my lack of knowledge, it was clear that the torture to which he sub¬
jected his victims was no big deal to him.

“And why did you torture them?”

“I just wanted to see what happened. In fact, I tried to help these
people recover from their infections with antibiotics. I tried to help
them.”

“But you did things like stick your fingers in their eyes and then
shocked them and then injected them with Drano.”

“They were experiments, nothing more, nothing less.” Inside, I was
taken aback by his languid attitude, even though I knew he fit the pat¬
tern of all serial killers. Like the other serial killers, he was an empty
shell, bereft of most human emotion. Still, something here bothered
me. As the hours passed and I talked with him, I realized this guy was
probably the most heinous, most perfect clinical example of someone
who lacked humanity and human emotion. He said repeatedly that he
had tried to help the people, whom he considered to be his slaves. But
it was just something he said, said without emotion, without empathy

The Sadism of Robert Berdella | 195

or sympathy, said just because he felt he was probably supposed to say
something like that.

“You had all kinds of sex with those people. Can you tell me about
that?”

“I kept them for my excitement, to do my bidding, so that they
would not even think of doing anything without my permission.”

When Berdella talked about excitement, it was not the kind of ex¬
citement that most people feel. It was not a pleasure full of joy, delight,
or happiness. It was not the soft warmth a young lover feels after mak¬
ing love. There was no elation when Berdella had sex, nor did he feel
any comfort when someone like Pearson lay next to him in bed. He
had a person next to him, but he was not really a companion. It was
similar to a young child manipulating his environment. He plays and
plays and doesn’t stop until he feels the object (in this case, the person)
belongs to him. Whatever is his belongs to him and him alone, and
he’ll keep it as long as he can, like Charles Schulz’s Linus and his secu¬
rity blanket.

Like a child, Berdella learned about his victims by doing things to
them rather than by planning what to do. In other words, he had a
more concrete relationship to the person he was hurting. The intent
was not to murder, but just to experiment. When I use the word con¬
crete, it’s important to understand what I mean. Psychiatrists use con¬
crete to indicate a thinking and learning style. Every young child has
concrete thinking. It’s why they don’t teach math to children until the
second or third grade; math requires abstract thinking, a way of think¬
ing that goes beyond what the child can see. In kindergarten, for ex¬
ample, teachers use manipulatives, as they call them, like beans or
coins to teach children to count. Kids can’t picture in their mind the
value of what “6 + 6” is.

I’m not saying that Berdella couldn’t count well. I’m saying that he
couldn’t grasp the abstract ideas about life itself, ideas that every
human deals with every day. Berdella, when it came to his victims,
couldn’t picture what the meaning of torture or even death is. He
didn’t know that it hurt. He didn’t know that it caused irreparable
harm. Even when Pearson bit Berdella’s penis, Berdella didn’t under-

196 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

stand it. He felt the pain, but not enough to kill Pearson. Most people
might immediately react to the pain by wanting to get back at the per¬
son who hurt them, a reaction that might lead to killing someone who
did such a thing. Berdella did nothing to Pearson right away; he just
left the house and went to the hospital.

So Berdella’s torturing of Larry Pearson and the others was almost
like a baby playing with a ball or one of those motorized playthings
that hangs over a crib. He did not feel it was evil. He did not feel it was
wrong. The only way to look at Berdella’s failure when it came to emo¬
tional maturity is that he was a curious baby boy playing with a toy.

And when he masturbated while looking at the photos of his vic¬
tims, there was no savoring of the moments past. For him, it was just
a release without emotion. Some doctors have called Berdella a sexual
psychopath. But even that moniker gives him too much credit for par¬
tially being whole and human. Psychopaths only experience a lack of
conscience. Able to kill without experiencing remorse, psychopaths
are otherwise humans like the rest of us, able to experience joy and
happiness.

Yet another psychiatrist said that Berdella was lashing out at people
who remind him too much of himself. But this psychiatrist acts as if
serial killers are human beings gone astray and that psychiatrists and
psychologists can explain them on the basis of any old theory. If that’s
the case, and if they’re just old psychological structures that we know
very well, then why can’t we treat them? Why can’t we simply give
them medication to stop their killings? Why can’t we use talking or be¬
havior therapy, which works so well in other people, to help them? It
can’t be done, that’s why. They are not treatable. They cannot be fixed
and they cannot heal.

There was even one sensationalist-minded doctor who believed that
Berdella got an erection when talking about his crimes during his
three-day confession to police. And he said this without any proof
from Berdella or from the police. But that theory is a lot of hooey; it’s
taking sex and aggression and making it human again. If it happened,
and I doubt it did, it was an excitement but not a sexual excitement.
Robert Berdella would not have confessed in order to become aroused.

The Sadism of Robert Berdella

197

He did it to avoid the death penalty, which he said to me directly. Just
like Bobby Joe Long, he did not in any way want to die by the electric
chair or by lethal injection.

I asked Berdella, “How did you feel when you killed Larry Pear-
son:

“I put him to sleep. There was nothing else I could do. I had to go
to the hospital. It was the best thing for him.”

“What did you think of Larry Pearson after you killed him?”

“I didn’t. Not that much. I put him out of his misery. He would
have suffered while I was in the hospital. I didn’t think of him very
much after I disposed of the body. I had other things to do.”

He sat there almost still, talking like a one-dimensional robot. In
fact, he was less emotional than a robot from a 1950s B movie, less
emotional than the pointy-eared Spock from Star Trek. As I listened to
him speak, I kept thinking, There must be a motive here. This can’t be
all there is. Even after speaking to so many serial killers, it was still hard
from me to believe. There wasn’t any there there. I tried one more time
to search for a motive. Police had discovered many things in Berdella’s
house. They found figures of many-headed dragons, odd windup toys
that shot sparks from their mouths, raisin-colored faces with hair that
looked like shrunken heads, scary plaster masks from faraway lands, a
human skull replica carefully placed under glass . . . and twenty books
on Satanism and witchcraft, including one called Satanic Interpreta¬
tions and Lifestyles. Also found was a book called How to Create Poisons.
And then there was Berdella’s record player. On the turntable was a
recording of Lucifer’s Black Mass.

“Did you practice any kind of worship of the devil?”

“I had an interest, but nothing much more than that. I was not a
Satanist, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Satanism would have been a terrific motive for the killings. The
idea of Berdella being a minion of the devil incarnate, which has struck
fear in man since the dawn of religion, had spooked the eleven detec¬
tives assigned to the case. Those thoughts of the devil made them be¬
lieve initially that Berdella was more complicated that he was. And the
idea of devil worship had Geraldo Rivera and his television audience

198 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

intrigued. But Berdella would read the books just like he would collect
windup toys. He’d get them, peruse them, put them on a shelf, and
pretty much forget about them. (Berdella was quite a hoarder; his
lawyer once asked Berdella’s mother if she wanted the criminal’s papers,
not his infamous notebooks, but clippings and things he collected. On
hearing that he had four thousand pounds of them—two tons—she
declined.)

“Did you have the Black Mass on the record player?”

“Yes, but I thought someone who came over to visit might get a
kick out of listening to it. A lot of people came over to the house.
These were individuals who didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Like most serial murders, he wasn’t killing all the time. Berdella was
actively involved in his local neighborhood crime watch and with rais¬
ing money for the city’s public television station. He readily opened his
door to the drug addicts, drunks, and prostitutes he met on the streets
of Kansas City. People would stop by the house on Charlotte Street at
all hours of the night to do drugs or to hang around. It makes some
sense that Berdella would try to entertain them—whether or not he
later chose to torture them. But the people who came by were too
much chaotic stimulation for Berdella; he didn’t know how to deal
with them.

“Sometimes I think it was those people who did the killing.”

Oh, give me a break, I thought. Though there was a theory that po¬
lice toyed with stating that Berdella had help with the killings, it never
came to anything. Berdella was constantly making excuses for himself
I knew it was a lie, a typical serial murderer lie, and I moved on to the
next thing.

“Can you tell me anything about your family back when you were
a child?”

Berdella averted his eyes. “My father died when I was sixteen. He
worked at the Ford plant on an assembly line. Later he drove a truck.
He liked sports a lot, more than I did. He bowled. He was just thirty-
nine when he died. Too young to die.”

“What else?”

“He used to beat me with a leather belt.”

The Sadism of Robert Berdella

199

“A lot?”

“Yes.”

“And your mother?”

Berdella stroked his big walrus mustache. “She still tries to help me
while I’m here. However, we sometimes get into arguments when I call
or when she travels here. I write to her often.”

“When you were a child, were there any things you liked to do?”

“Orchids. I used to grow and sell orchids. I had a friend at a nurs¬
ery who showed me how to grow them. And I liked to paint.”

“Were there any incidents as a child that you remember, good or
bad?”

“Not as a child. But at sixteen, I was raped where I worked, at a
restaurant where I worked part-time.”

I do not believe that Roberts murders had anything to do with his
beatings by his father or with the homosexual rape he alleged he suf¬
fered as a teen. Berdella did tell me that he had gotten a gift of a chem¬
istry set and that he was beaten by his father when he poured the
remains of an experiment out the window, damaging the paint on the
family’s house. This says more about Robert’s interest in experimenta¬
tion at an early age (as did his love for growing orchids, plants that are
difficult to keep alive) than it says about Robert’s being forever emo¬
tionally affected by the strappings.

Unlike the other serial killers, Berdella had something of a problem
with incarceration, screaming at social workers, complaining about the
lack of hygiene in the prison, ultimately filing 175 grievances before
being transferred to St. Louis’s Potosi Correctional Center. Because Po-
tosi was newer and he had access to TV and the library, he calmed
somewhat (with the exception of a brief hunger strike, an action he
took because the prison ruled that he could spend only forty dollars
each month). After serving four years in prison, Robert Andrew
Berdella Jr. died in prison of a heart attack at the age of forty-three.

I had learned a few important things from Berdella. The first was
personal: though I had spoken with many serial murderers, I still could
feel sickened about the nature of their crimes, no matter how detached
I tried to be. The second thing was about the theory of experimenta-

200 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

tion and serial murderers. It was with Berdella that I began to believe
that experimentation links many serial murderers, and this discovery
was very compelling. I had long been intrigued by the killings of
H. H. Mudgett in Chicago when I researched his case because his ex¬
periments became stranger and stranger as he killed; he sometimes cut
up his victims to see what was inside. Some have called these autopsies,
but there was no medical knowledge behind them. They were more
like haphazard dissections. Ed Gein experimented by wearing a suit
made of skin, as did John Gacy by putting the heads of his victims
under water to see if they’d survive. It all was coming together. I could
now say with assurance that at least some experimentation was part of
every serial murderer’s way of working. None of them could really pin¬
point why they did these things, and that led me to believe even more
that they hadn’t progressed emotionally beyond the age of three to six
months.

TWELVE

THE TRIGGER:
MICHAEL LEE LOCKHART

S erial killers take to the road as well. When I speak to a group of
people, whether they’re lawyers, doctors, or students, I some¬
times joke that if it weren’t for the interstate system of highways, serial
killers would probably stay in one place (as did Ed Gein) and be a lot
easier to apprehend. While they will occasionally take a plane, thank¬
fully none of them has attacked anyone in the air. When they travel
America’s highways and byways by car, serial murderers don’t do it with
the manic glee of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born
Killers, nor do they fight with and claw at each other like the charac¬
ters Mickey and Mallory did. That’s fiction, and the movies rarely get
it right (but then again, they don’t want to; they need to entertain).

Like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Richard Macek, and many oth¬
ers, most serial killers (with some exceptions I’ll write about later) pre¬
fer to travel alone. They don’t want partners and they usually don’t
want hostages. They don’t have any appreciation for the mystique of
the road, nor do they stop, get out, and appreciate the beauty of a wa¬
terfall along a creek or deer in a meadow along the way. And they really
aren’t using the car or the highways to make a rapid escape, like a bank
robber might do.

202 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Take the case of Michael Lee Lockhart, an Ohio native and high
school dropout who logged thirty thousand miles in a Corvette and a
Toyota on a spree that led him to brag about crimes in forty-five states.
Lockhart was one of the smoothest, most charming serial killers in a
murderous fraternity that is full of charmers. Adding to his allure was
the fact that Lockhart was blessed by nature; he was an attractive man
who took advantage of women throughout his life. (Even when he was
captured and police moved him through a Gulfport, Mississippi, air¬
port, he began flirting with an airline counter clerk, who was so moved
by whatever he said that she didn’t believe police when they burst her
bubble by stating that Lockhart was a vicious killer. He was shackled
and chained at the time, but she didn’t seem to notice.) Michael told
the women in his life exactly what they wanted to hear, and then, when
they were hooked and he became bored or wanted something new, he’d
move on.

Then, on one autumn afternoon, things changed.

In October 1987, the town of Griffith, Indiana, was a quiet little
place about an hour outside of Chicago. It was the kind of place where
there wasn’t a lot of nasty news to report. The blue-collar workers who
populated most of the town were good people who’d been though the
unfortunate closing of factories in the 1970s, and they’d survived.
Overall, it was a law-abiding town that was not ostentatious in any
way. The town even had a curfew for teens between ages thirteen and
eighteen—10:30 P.M. on school nights.

As Michael Lee Lockhart drove through Griffith, he spotted Windy
Patricia Gallagher as she left school. A chatty sixteen-year-old cheer¬
leader for the high school basketball and football squads, the pretty
and likable Windy worked at the local McDonald’s to make some extra
money. Freckle-faced and skinny, she still seemed more like a girl than
a teen, even when she wore lipstick. Lockhart followed her home. He
quietly waited in the car and watched her go inside. Once she had
closed the door, he waited some more, biding his time. After a few
minutes passed, he got out of the car and sauntered up to the door to
ring the bell. Lockhart said he needed to make a phone call, and when
Gallagher saw the neatly dressed, handsome young man, she invited

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart | 203

him in. When he lingered after the phone call, Windy initially thought
nothing of it. She even gave him a glass of water.

Lockhart then dragged Windy up to the bedroom. He tied her
hands behind her back and forced her bra up and over her breasts and
stripped her from the waist down. With a knife, he stabbed her four
times in the neck and seventeen times in the stomach. Windy’s intes¬
tines were pulled up and out of her abdomen, as though they had been
probed and examined, and a large pool of blood formed around her
body as her life seeped away. It was such an evil murder that police
began interviewing self-proclaimed Satanists in the area to see if
Windy’s murder had something to do with ritualistic human sacrifice
(which the Satanists had bragged about on previous occasions).

The next fateful stop for Lockhart was a car dealership in Toledo,
Ohio. During a test drive, Michael pointed a .357 Smith & Wesson
Magnum revolver at salesman Rick Treadwell, took his money and
credit cards, forced him from the red 1986 Corvette, and used its 230-
horsepower engine to speed away, heading south to warmer climes in
Florida. Later Lockhart would use Treadwell’s identity as an alias. He
also stole various IDs and a wallet from a man named Philip Tanner of
Jacksonville, Florida, and used that name as well. Sometimes he would
shorten his name and call himself Mike Locke.

Next came western Florida. East Lake Pladgett is part of the Land
O’ Lakes building project on Florida’s Highway 41. Even though mar¬
keters boasted a familiar name for their new development (the famous
butter is not manufactured here), real estate agents in the 1980s found
it somewhat difficult to fill the homes they’d built. In a way, the town
still felt like the small citrus farming community it had been prior to
the building boom. Boasting one hundred lakes and a twenty-five-mile
distance to Tampa, the new community allowed each of its home¬
steaders to feel he was well protected from the crimes of the big city,
and at a good price to boot. Nice-size lots could be purchased for any¬
where from four thousand to ten thousand dollars. Residents could
boat and swim in the lakes, and spot the occasional heron as well.

Jennifer Lynn Colhouer, an intelligent fourteen-year-old girl,
freckle-faced like Windy, enjoyed living in East Lake Pladgett. Like

204 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

most Florida teens, she was fond of lying in the sun and talking with
her pals on the phone, and she was excited about having her braces re¬
moved. Jennifer was the girl next door, bright, vivacious, nice. It was
said that Jennifer did a terrific imitation of Cher, and she had a collec¬
tion of soda pop cans, which she hung by ribbons from the ceiling in
her bedroom.

The serial murderer made his way into Jennifer’s house on the af¬
ternoon of January 20, 1988. Like Windy, Jennifer freely permitted the
charming Lockhart access, as he posed as a real estate agent. He just
seemed like such a nice guy. Most people who knew him couldn’t tell
that he was full of bull, at least not on the first few meetings.

Lockhart forced her quickly to the upper level of the duplex, just as
he had taken Windy Gallagher. Jennifer shook from fear and panic. He
pushed her T-shirt and her bra up over her breasts, and took the rest of
her clothes from her. He left on her socks and sneakers. On that sec¬
ond floor, he sodomized her and slashed at her with a knife until she
was dead. With such force and determination did he slash that Jen¬
nifer’s liver was cut in two. Jennifer’s intestines, like those of Windy’s,
spilled from her abdomen. Again, Lockhart was compelled to feel and
touch Jennifer’s warm blood and intestines. Lockhart was drawn to the
flush of the blood and he pulled at, touched, and examined what was
inside of her, but not in any truly sexual way. Also, when someone cuts
open a human body, there’s a warmth that rushes up that has been de¬
scribed by some as appealing to serial murderers, who, as I’ve said, have
not progressed past infancy emotionally. Lockhart wanted to see what
was there, what it looked like, what it felt like, what it smelled like. Po¬
lice in Pasco County said the sight of Jennifer’s eviscerated body was
the worst thing they had ever seen in their years on the force.

Jennifer’s brother Jeremy found his sister in a puddle of blood in his
bedroom, next to his toys. A twelve-inch carving knife, the murder
weapon taken from the kitchen, was found just beneath the wheels of
a racing car, an STP decal on the toy’s side. Lockhart probably had
threatened her with the knife to force her upstairs.

Michael Lee Lockhart didn’t stop to think about what he had done.
Instead, he continued the trek in his stolen Corvette, this time head-

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart | 205

ing west to the Lone Star State, getting as far as Beaumont, Texas, be¬
fore settling on a place to stay for a few days.

Drugs were big in Beaumont, which had the questionable distinc¬
tion of being on the country’s most frequently used highways for trans¬
porting drugs. The city was trying desperately to emerge from its
malaise, but it had one of the worst economies in the nation. “Dope
Town” became an uncivil, drug-ridden area that most people chose to
avoid.

It was drugs that Beaumont police officer Paul Hulsey Jr. was look¬
ing for when he spotted a local drug dealer and an unfamiliar man
driving by in a sporty red Corvette in the early evening of March 22.
Hulsey found and questioned the small-time drug dealer, who had
been given a ride by Lockhart, but the Corvette had already sped away.
In his heart, Hulsey felt some kind of a drug deal was going to happen
sometime soon, so he searched for the Corvette in the parking lots of
the local motels until he found it at the Best Western motel. When
Hulsey approached Lockhart in room 157, there was an argument and
then a struggle.

Lockhart found his Magnum and shot Hulsey.

“I need assistance,” the injured Hulsey cried into his walkie-talkie.
But those were the last words Hulsey had the strength to utter to his
colleagues. Lockhart shot Hulsey again, and killed him.

Lockhart did the one thing you don’t want to do anywhere, but es¬
pecially not in Texas: he killed a cop. His hand bleeding profusely from
being bitten by Hulsey during their clash, Lockhart ran out of the
motel room and into the car, speeding away at a hundred miles an
hour. As police caught up with him, he lost control of the vehicle and
jumped from it before it crashed. Still, he managed to elude them,
quickly cleaned up at a restaurant, and got a cab to agree to drive him
to Houston, where he hoped to hide.

The Texas Highway Patrol, now involved in the manhunt, caught
up with the cab. To their surprise, the cab pulled over on the right
shoulder. As officers walked close enough to see into the windows, they
felt Lockhart had evaded authorities once again—they saw only the
cabbie. Still, they moved forward with caution. Then, close enough to

206 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

look into the backseat, they saw him. Lockhart was there on the back¬
seat. He wasn’t hiding or cowering in fear. He wasn’t taking aim with
his gun.

He was sleeping like a baby.

But how could he have been calm enough to nap? Ordinary people
would have thought, Gee, I have to get away and get away good.
Adrenaline would have been pumping, and survival instincts would be
at their peak. So I don’t think Lockhart was simply exhausted. My
guess is that he was lulled by the movement of the car, which can have
a soothing, soporific effect, especially for someone like Lockhart, who
wasn’t emotionally developed. When babies are colicky and won’t set¬
tle down, the old remedy used to be to put them in a car and drive
them around until they calm. Some people now do the same thing by
putting a baby, carefully strapped into a seat, on top of a clothes dryer.
It’s the vibration that seems to pacify them. Perhaps that’s one of the
reasons Lockhart drove around a lot. It wasn’t that he drove to forget
because he was worrying about his victims; none of them worry about
the victims. Driving probably did for Lockhart what playing sports can
do for others. It put him in the zone. It’s like a baseball pitcher who,
no matter what’s going on around him, focuses on the task at hand.
The thought here was singular, simple, and concrete: to drive and drive
and do nothing else.

Once Lockhart was caught, he began to spill the beans to police.
Animatedly, he talked with them about the crime of killing Hulsey,
chatting casually, as though the cops were lifelong friends who would
sympathize with his side of the story. He said the crime was Hulsey’s
fault, that he told Hulsey not to enter his Best Western hotel room,
and he did anyway. Lockhart continued, “Why did he come into my
room without a fucking backup, anyway? That was stupid!” The police
held their tongues and began to become excited because they believed
Lockhart was ready to confess. Yet they didn’t want him to say too
much without a lawyer, since that would jeopardize the whole case.

A day later, things changed. The same cops were called to Lock¬
hart’s cell, where he was screaming and raving. He swore at them re¬
peatedly and vowed never to cooperate with them, ranting that he had

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart | 207

seen a story in the paper in which the police called him a drug dealer.
It was completely disconcerting for the authorities when Lockhart
slipped from what they saw as giving a forthright confession to out-of-
control raving. As we’ve seen, this is typical behavior for a serial killer.
As if at the flip of a coin, their aspect, their external selves, change.
Again, what Lockhart did was very childlike. At one moment, police
were his best friends; at another moment he hated them, and for no
reason at that.

Lockhart’s impulsive nature went even further than his turnaround
with police. It extended into the courtroom. After a break in jury se¬
lection for the case in Texas but before proceedings resumed, Michael
leapt up from his chair, ran toward the window, and jumped through
it. Shards flew everywhere.

To me, this dumb but dramatic performance proved that serial
murderers are not the scheming people they seem to be. Lawyers for
the prosecution give them a lot more credit for organizing and plan¬
ning their murders than they really can muster. They can, however, or¬
ganize simple, concrete things. Gacy had his ledger. Berdella had his
notebook. During the investigation, Lockhart was said by a young
woman he once dated to have kept a detailed but scruffy diary, held to¬
gether by a rubber band. (This calendar book was never found, much
to the disappointment of police. I believe it could have led police to
other murders.)

Michael Lockhart didn’t get far when he crashed through the win¬
dow. He broke a bone in his pelvis when he landed, just one floor
down, and was apprehended immediately.

The first time I saw Michael Lee Lockhart was at the request of the
prosecutor’s office in Porter County, Indiana, where he was being held
for the Windy Gallagher murder trial. As is often the case when I be¬
come involved with the legal system, I was asked to examine Michael
Lee Lockhart to gauge his mental state, his sanity or lack thereof. Lock¬
hart was actually an attractive man. I’ve previously pointed out that
many of the serial murderers I have met are average men who are over¬
weight and doughy. They’re charming but not handsome, with an un-

208 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

derlying feminine air. Lockhart too had this noticeably feminine man¬
ner that almost imperceptibly manifested itself in his posture, his
movements, and his voice. To me, it means they all have this kind of
free-flowing identity that is sometimes male and sometimes female
and sometimes something in between, pointing to the fact that they
have a very fluid sexuality, which means they can function as hetero¬
sexuals or homosexuals. I can’t say that it was his eyes or his bone
structure or his hair that was appealing. Really, it was the whole pack¬
age. Lockhart had something, and he could have used his assets for
doing something positive. Instead he ruined his life, and the lives of
many others.

On that day, Lockhart was antagonistic, and he was acting like a
diva. One of the things I’ve seen with serial killers is that they tend to
think they are stars of some sort. For Lockhart and all of these guys,
the moniker “serial killer” gives them an identity, makes them feel spe¬
cial. After many years of aimlessness and floating around from job to
job, Lockhart realized, That’s who I am! I’m a serial killer. It was like
looking in the mirror, seeing nothing for a long time, and then finally
seeing a reflection.

Making a serial killer into someone who is respected and even
revered because he, for some time, got away with disgusting acts of
murder is something I will not accept or understand. Lockhart had
been visited by the top brass at the local police department (people
who never come down to see the average felon), but that wasn’t enough
for his massive ego. He demanded special treatment and privileges:
better food than he was served; better treatment from the guards; bet¬
ter entertainment on TV. He couldn’t stand being treated like the av¬
erage prisoner.

“Why can’t you help me out? You’re a doctor. If you’re so big, why
can’t you help me get better treatment here?”

“I’m not your lawyer, Michael. And I’m not a relative. And I don’t
want to be addressed with that tone of voice.”

“I’m sick.”

“You’re not feeling well?”

“AIDS. I have AIDS.”

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart | 209

“There’s no evidence of that, Michael.”

By now we know that most serial killers firmly believe they have
some appalling disease. Strangely, they never follow up with anything
reflective, such as “I’m scared I’m going to die.” Their minds don’t
work in that way. Lockhart’s statement about AIDS is like that of a
child with whom I’ve worked who has cancer and says, “I have cancer
and they’re sticking me with all these needles and I don’t like it.” For
both, it’s far more about the immediacy of what they see as today’s ob¬
stacle, not a plea for sympathy because the Grim Reaper is near.

Lockhart brooded for a while, and I made an effort to change the
subject.

“Where were you born?”

“In Ohio. Wallbridge.”

“How was that?”

“It sucked.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t good.”

“What wasn’t good?”

“The town sucked. My parents. People around me. The whole
deal.”

“How?”

“Assholes molested me.”

I knew there was no evidence that Lockhart had been sexually
abused. He continued answering my questions in short, clipped sen¬
tences that told me very little about how he killed and his reasoning
for his killing, and I decided I was not going to accomplish much. I
left the small jail where he was being kept and went about my business.
Sometimes you can’t push things with serial murderers. When they
clam up like spoiled children, there’s nothing I can do.

Nearly ten years later, I visited Lockhart again, this time in the East
Texas city of Huntsville. It’s a city in which many people are employed
by the prison system, and the prison aura pervades most activities in
the town. Until it was ended in 1986, the Texas Prison Rodeo, with
horses and bulls ridden by inmates themselves, drew almost eighty
thousand fans to Huntsville each October. To this day, a popular des-

210 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

tination in town is the Texas Prison Museum, where the blood-red “Old
Sparky” electric chair is the grim star of the show. Prison culture and
prison lore are beyond popular culture in Huntsville; it spawns romance.
Some of the guards at the prison have married former prisoners.

Twelve miles north of Huntsville, the Ellis complex itself was ex¬
pansive and barren, made of big, thick brick and surrounded by fences
and massive amounts of barbed wire. The redbrick building in which
the executions themselves take place was known as The Walls. On its
facade near the street was a large clock, slowly ticking away the mo¬
ments of freedom that prisoners have lost. Although there were trees
outside, the massive 11,000 acres of land itself was flat and uninspired,
somehow already dead. Somewhere, I was told, there was a livestock
operation and a prison farm, all for 2,200 inmates, 450 of whom were
on death row. There was even a prison cemetery there, with simple
white crosses and the prisoners identification number. On one grave,
the ground was freshly broken.

As I approached the doors of the prison, I expected the worst from
the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. I had heard so much about
Texas-style justice, and how the officials skirted the rules when they
wanted to. People were hanged in Texas until 1923 and were executed
by electric chair until 1964. Texas itself seemed to be enamored of the
death penalty; the number of those killed increased exponentially in
the 1990s. Back in 1977, about the time I began my work, death row
in Texas was a simple row of cells holding two dozen people. By 1997
when Lockhart was to be executed, death row was six times as big (with
each section holding three levels of cells); also that year, forty prison¬
ers’ lives were ended, each by lethal injection that used about $86
worth of drugs. Over three hundred people have been so injected since
1982. The Lone Star State leads all of the United States in the number
of executions performed. Yet to my surprise everyone inside, from the
burly, macho guards on up, greeted me in a friendly manner. They
were respectful, gentlemanly, and just plain nice. The warden even
booked a spacious office as the interview room for Michael Lockhart
and me, far more appealing than the window with bulletproof glass,
the plastic chairs, and the primitive telephone system usually employed

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart | 211

by prisoners to talk with guests. Lockhart was permitted to be there
without shackles, and there was no guard present in the room.

This time Lockhart, after years on death row, was in a mood to talk,
and talk he did, endlessly. He talked like John Wayne Gacy in that
“motormouth” kind of way. Michael had his reasons for speaking
frankly; he was trying to appeal his death penalty ruling; he was used
to prison and even liked it at times; and he didn’t want to die by lethal
injection. As I had been in Indiana when he proved to be uncoopera¬
tive, I was there in Texas to try to gauge whether or not he was sane at
the time of the murders and whether there were mitigating circum¬
stances toward the formulation of an appeal. The lawyers would try to
inject some of his medical history, but my guess was that there really
wasn’t anything there that could convince the court. Still, I felt he
didn’t totally understand his crimes, and there was a slim chance that
he could avoid dying and live his life to its end in a small, sparse cell if
that was explained to the court succinctly.

But it was not the terrible murder in Indiana which took the life of
a Windy Gallagher (on what she called in her journal her “no worries
day”) that provoked the most important exchanges of our meeting. It
was the murder of the young teen in Land O’ Lakes.

I pulled up my chair close to the table and checked on my tape
recorder to make sure it was working properly. “Can you talk to me
about what led up to the murder of Jennifer Colhouer?”

“I was in Florida, and I said ‘I am a real estate agent’ to get into the
house. It was easy to get in. She wasn’t hard to convince.”

“Why were you posing as a real estate agent?”

Lockhart sat back in his seat, relaxed. “It seemed like a good idea at
the time. It gave me an excuse to go up to the house in the first place.”

“Did you come up with the idea that day?”

“Pretty much. I think there was an empty house, next door or a few
doors away.”

“And the girl let you in?”

“Just like that. I still can’t believe how easy it was. I could pretty
much pick up anyone off the street, and they would follow me any¬
where like a little puppy dog.”

212 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“It was that easy.”

Lockhart leaned farther back in his chair and clasped his hands be¬
hind his head. “It was that easy.”

I had seen it all too much in the past. Too many people just don’t
use their judgment; they don’t take a moment to consider the conse¬
quences before they do something. Lockhart looked like a nice guy
with a pleasant demeanor. Nothing set off a trigger that said “be care¬
ful,” whereas if a potential victim saw a scruffy-looking guy standing
on the doorstep, he or she would think twice.

“Let’s go back in time a few hours. How did you start the day?”

“I got up, and I went to take a shower.”

“Got up when?”

“Late morning or early afternoon, I guess.” Lockhart kept the hours
of a rock star or celebrity. He didn’t have any kind of job, so he got up
when he felt like getting up. And he enjoyed the nightlife, drinking
and flirting with women at various bars in the area.

“Then what?”

“I was in the shower, washing up. And then it hit me. I had to go
out and get me one.”

It was as though at that moment, a lightbulb went on in my head.
This really was one of those “eureka!” moments. I thought again about
what he said: “And then it hit me. I had to go out and get me one. ” This
simple, fourteen-word explanation was truly bigger than Lockhart had
made it out to be. Lockhart had spoken it so casually and almost qui¬
etly that I was surprised I didn’t miss it. “I had to go out and get me one. ”
I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even as I tried to continue my exam¬
ination. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his mother or that his father had
abused him, and that led him to kill. There was something deeper at
work here, something that had less to do with nurture and more to do
with nature. To me, there was a consequential, scientifically logical
connection to be made here, a connection that no one, absolutely no
one, before had made.

Part of my workaday life has been spent counseling drug-
dependent youths. Those people, young men and women alike, were
truly addled teens who really couldn’t exist without their daily doses of

The Trigger: Michael Lee Lockhart | 213

cocaine or crack or heroin. Some consumed more than others, but they
all had one thing in common: the habit. And the way those people de¬
scribed the frenzied need to feed their habits was quite similar to the
way Michael Lee Lockhart described his sudden urgency to get a vic¬
tim. It wasn’t just a need; it was a drive, a compulsion. It came on like
a flash and it came on strong. And when it came, it couldn’t be
stopped.

The question I had was as intriguing as it was challenging. Just as
the kids I counseled were addicted to drugs, were serial killers addicted
to killing? But in what way were they addicted? What caused it, and
why? Certainly, if it were an addiction, an addiction theory would
strike a serious blow to the prevailing thought, which held that serial
killing was related to upbringing and abuse by the family.

I asked Lockhart a few more questions.

“What about the others?”

Lockhart looked around the room and then at me. “What others?”

“The others you killed.”

Lockhart shrugged his shoulders. “Well, there could have been
more.”

“Where did they happen?”

“Where? All around. Not just one place. I been all around.”

All around, all over the place, but now in one place, in one cell.

Years later, on December 9, 1997, after consuming a simple last
meal consisting of a double cheeseburger, french fries, and a Coke, the
thirty-seven-year-old Lockhart quietly received a lethal injection from
the state of Texas for the murder of Officer Hulsey. I believe that Lock¬
hart killed as many as ten more people, although police believe he
killed as many as twenty more. The reason police open up the unsolved
crime files when there’s a serial murderer around is that it’s very well
known that they just kill and kill and kill. Lockhart wasn’t prosecuted
for the other crimes because he left no trace at the crime scenes. Sadly,
the unknown people who have been murdered by serial killers could
populate a small town. Somewhere, someplace, there should be a dig¬
nified memorial to the many unknown victims.

It wasn’t Lockhart’s death that had an effect on me. It was the ad-

214 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

diction model of murder that I had discovered. In speaking to him for
over one hundred hours, it was those few seconds, basically one sen¬
tence, that made everything jell. I looked at the people I had inter¬
viewed before. Gacy felt compelled to troll the streets in the middle of
the night. Macek suddenly showing up in a Laundromat or a hotel
room. Long turning off the highway to find the house of a young girl,
a house he’d never seen before in a community he’d never before fre¬
quented. All the others before and all the others in the future: they all
had this trigger moment prior to killing. They were addicted to killing.

THIRTEEN

ROSEMARY WEST AND
PARTNERS IN SERIAL CRIME

I looked carefully at her letters and remembered that she loved tea.

Tea and teatime. That civilized, comforting ritual, when people
take the time to sip and relax, gossip and converse, is one that’s always
associated with modern-day England. When Anna, the Seventh
Duchess of Bedford, introduced her idea of teatime in the early 1800s,
she partook, talked, and then walked with her friends through the pas¬
toral meadows that were then still common in London. Before the in¬
troduction of these fashionable, late afternoon sit-downs to tea and
cakes and chat, the Brits consumed just two meals each day. Many of
the British think that most things can be taken care of with the help of
a nicely brewed cup of tea (London protesters against the war in Iraq
carried signs through London saying MAKE TEA, NOT war). Teas such
as Earl Grey and English Breakfast are common at any time here in the
United States, and I enjoy them on gloomy, rainy days in Chicago or
after a difficult day at work.

But for the victims of Rosemary West, the dowdy partner in crime
and wife of serial killer Frederick West, teatime entailed something far
more sinister. It was after she and Fred had tortured and raped their
quarry that the bespectacled Rosemary would brew some tea in a ket-

216 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

tie in an effort to soothe and pacify these traumatized young people
and children. These victims included the West’s innocent daughters.

The ghastly story of what the Wests did and how they did it is the
story of a particular kind of serial murderer called “partnership killers.”
Early in this book, I pointed out the case of Chicago serial killer H. H.
Holmes (also known as Herman Mudgett), and his helper, the quiet,
brawny Benjamin Pitezel. Pitezel was like a slave to Mudgett in
Chicago during the time of the World’s Fair, and he would ultimately
be killed by Mudgett. The murders of French hero turned serial mur¬
derer Gilles de Rais included a small group of loyal minions in his
inner circle. More recently, there was the well-documented Beltway
Sniper case of John Allen Mohammad, a former U.S. Army weapons
expert and his teenage accomplice, John Lee Malvo. Their actions,
which frightened the whole country in late 2002, qualify as partner¬
ship killings.

But it’s the husband-and-wife team of partnership killers that often
forms the strongest bond. In this case, Fred West was the dominant
member of the couple, and Rose was the submissive. Fred killed at least
twelve over the course of two decades, from 1967 to 1987. It began
with the murder of Ann McFall, the Scottish nanny pregnant with
West’s child, and ended with the murder of Heather West, Rose and
Fred’s first daughter. Information about as many as twenty more of the
dead he held back from the police; West said he would offer the loca¬
tions of the bodies at the rate of one each year, as though he still had
the ability to control things, as if he were still the dominant one.

But one bit of caution before I continue: don’t think of the words
dominant and submissive as sexual terms. Though Fred and Rose in¬
dulged in violent sex, their relationship shouldn’t be thought of as one
that was based purely around Fred’s fantasy world of S-M sex. It’s no se¬
cret that there are those in society who indulge in such sex play, using
whips and chains and rubber costumes. For these folks, such activity can
let off steam or can be a kind of safety valve that releases some of the con¬
tinual pressures of today’s society. Both partners in S-M sex are willing,
consenting adults. While many may not consider it “normal” sex, no one
is seriously injured. No one is scarred for life. And no one dies.

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 217

I did not get to study the mangled mind of Fred West personally
because he did not live very long in his English jail cell. While the
guards were changing shifts, West hanged himself with strips of sheet¬
ing from his bed long before his trial.

I did, however, have a relationship with Rosemary West. I had been
interviewed by the BBC television network about the case for a docu¬
mentary about the Wests. After the broadcast, as is often the case, I re¬
ceived permission from Rose’s lawyer, Richard Ferguson, to begin a
correspondence in which she sent me letters in response to various
questions I had about what had gone on in her mind and in her fam¬
ily history. Rose’s lawyers felt that if we exchanged such letters, some
fact or series of facts might emerge that would help Rose in her ongo¬
ing legal battles. The letters arrived secretly through the hands of mes¬
sengers, so they would not be viewed by prison officials or anyone who
might decide to open the mail. In a very rare development, Rose re¬
fused to sign the short document I require of most serial murderers
with whom I deal, the one that permits me, for scientific purposes, to
write about everything they say and write. Nor will she give permission
now. While I can’t reveal the particulars of those many letters, I can
write about the murders themselves, murders that took twenty long
years to discover. And I can write about the lives so secretly lived
within Cromwell Street itself, in the gray fog of Gloucester, England,
located on the ancient River Severn. I can analyze most of what went
on in what the British press called the “Ffouse of Fforrors” 114 miles
west of London, but it would be unethical of me to write about or ex¬
cerpt those most private letters from Rose West.

It would have been easy to miss. A casual passerby would have ignored
that three-story home at 25 Cromwell Street, beige, nondescript, and
on a side street as it was. But that passerby might have noticed the
fancy wrought-iron sign that heralded its address in black and white.
Bold and almost brazen, it showed Frederick West’s pride in his awful
little kingdom, as it seemed to say, “This is my property to do with
what I want to do. The same goes for what’s inside, including my wife
and my daughters. My property . . . and no one else’s.”

218 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

The star-crossed relationship between Fred and Rose started off
simply enough in 1969. Fred had the kind of square-faced, rugged ap¬
peal of a farm worker. Fie mastered the gift of gab early on in life and
he used it on fifteen-year-old Rose Letts at a bus stop. Nervously wait¬
ing there, she looked even younger than her years, with her white dress,
curly black hair, and short white socks. In fact, she looked like a little
girl, cute and round-faced, and a little chubby. She had come from a
poor family and began working at a bakery at the age of twelve, giving
her mother ten dollars of her wages each week. Tier father, Bill, ruled
his family with an iron fist, and Rose lived in fear of him, although he
treated her better than the rest.

By the time Rose met Fred, she had dated and lived for a short time
with an older man with whom she had sex. Already well into his twen¬
ties, Fred played into Rose’s love for children by saying he had two
daughters, Anna Marie and Charmaine, from a previous marriage,
who desperately needed minding. Rose soon moved in with Fred and
obeyed his every order, as she thought a good future wife should. She
did not know that Fred had already been arrested for impregnating a
thirteen-year-old girl.

By the time the two were married in 1972, Rose had had a daugh¬
ter with Fred called FI eat her, who would grow up to look much like
her father. Also, Rose was pregnant with a second child, who would be
named Mae June West. Immediately after their marriage and even
while she was carrying Heather, Fred began prodding Rose to have sex
with other men.

It was not just the goading to see Rose in bed with other men in
which Fred indulged. He was up to far more unpleasant things. Fred
had decided to dismember and murder his previous wife, Rena, and
their daughter Charmaine, who lived with the murdering couple.
(Charmaine was in reality the daughter of an Asian bus driver. Fred
knew this, and Fred accepted the child, although he didn’t like the idea
of having a mixed race baby in the house. He referred to her as
adopted.) Rose took part in the beatings of Charmaine that led up to
her murder, sometimes whacking her with a wooden spoon, but likely
not killing her.

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 219

Previous to this, in 1967, Fred had murdered and dismembered his
girlfriend, Scottish nanny Ann McFall, who would have given birth, in
one month, to their child. Fie also removed a number of Ann’s fingers
and toes before burying her in a field near his hometown of Much
Marcle, a tiny farming community. Fred did the same with Char-
maine, and chopped off her patella (the kneecap) as well. Later, he
would kill the mother of his child again. When Fred had relations with
Shirley Robinson, a lodger at Cromwell Street, she become pregnant
and threatened to tell Rose. On hearing this, the enraged West killed
Shirley by strangulation, cut her up with a serrated bread knife and a
cleaver, removed her baby from her womb, and dumped the two into
a hole in his backyard. Even the sturdy femur, the thighbone, had been
chopped through, not one but nine times.

As for Rose, she gave in fairly quickly to Fred’s ceaseless coaxing and
began prostituting herself at the couple’s new home at 25 Cromwell
Street. Fred took a provocative snapshot of Rose in a bra and low-
riding pants and placed it in a newspaper so she could readily hear
from clients. The Wests installed no separate phone line for these ser¬
vices, and their children often answered the phone to hear the foul re¬
quests. The address became a kind of brothel and hostel with hippieish
young white men and West Indian immigrants moving in and out at
all hours of the day and night. It was a more liberal time in which the
“do-your-own-thing” style of living was popular in Britain as well as in
the United States. Yet what they were creating at Cromwell Street
wasn’t just about smoking some pot, making love, and listening to the
music of Woodstock.

It was about savagery: savage rape, savage murder, and what in
Western society is the most unspeakable savagery, incest. Unusual as it
is for serial murderers to attack members of their families, don’t forget
that they were not all his biological children. It’s not an unheard-of
idea for parents to fawn over their biological children and mistreat
their adopted children. On top of that, Fred believed that his daugh¬
ters, biological or not, were his possessions and that he had a father’s
right to have sex with them before anyone else touched them. And
Rose helped him. In one instance, she held down and used a vibrator

220 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

on her gagged stepdaughter Anna Marie before Fred raped her. Rose
told Anna Marie that this was a good thing, that she was fortunate to
have such caring parents who would take time to prepare her for rela¬
tionships with men.

The round-faced child was just eight years old.

After the attack, Rose gave her a bath to soothe her and probably
made her some tea to sip. But poor Anna Marie suffered such pain
from the rape that she couldn’t attend school for some time. Rape such
as she endured creates a tremendous amount of irritation of the vagi¬
nal walls, and sometimes vaginal tearing. Simply, if you have a small
space and you’re trying to enlarge that space in a forceful way, you can
cause a lot of damage. What Fred did was severely painful for Anna
Marie. It would have taken five to seven days for the inflammation to
go down. If there was vaginal tearing, it would have taken a much
longer time to heal.

Rape like this occurred many times with the West daughters, and
lodgers in the house could hear screams and cries of “Daddy, stop it!”
emanating from the damp cellar. Yet they did nothing about it. They
didn’t call the police. They didn’t call social services. They didn’t talk
about it among themselves. They were silent. The way these transient
people dealt with incest is really no different from the way others have
dealt with it even in the more affluent suburbs here in the United
States. It is not mentioned; instead, it is hidden away as though it
couldn’t happen, as though it didn’t happen. This appalling silence was
an indictment of all of those people. If you know and if you’re deny¬
ing that it has happened, then you’re just as culpable.

At Cromwell Street, Fred West craved to have sex of any kind at any
time. Fie had Rose pose as she urinated, and he videotaped the act. Fie
poked a peephole in a door to watch Rosemary with her clients. After
rigging up a speaker and wires, he blandly watched television and lis¬
tened to Rose having sex while the TV was turned down. After touch¬
ing Rose’s genital area, he demanded that his progeny smell his fingers.
After sizing up his preteen son, Stephen, West declared that soon he
would be old enough to have sex with his mother. He told others that
he had had sex with farm animals. At any moment, he might try to

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 221

fondle any woman who passed by. With Rose in tow, he trolled the
streets of Gloucester in his car, searching for unsuspecting targets, hop¬
ing they would be virgins.

In her quiet way, Rose served as a procurer for Fred. You’re far more
likely to get into a car with a couple than with a single man. Rose’s
function was not to be West’s equal partner, not like Bonnie and Clyde,
where Bonnie often helped to case banks, fire weapons, and drive the
getaway car. Rose was Fred’s loyal, almost simpering helper whose
physical presence, whose very femaleness, made getting the girls much
easier.

When they picked up a young woman, none older than twenty-one
and most in their teens, they would take her back to Cromwell Street,
gag her, bind her face tightly with packing tape, and rape her. For these
purposes, Fred crafted his own tools of torture as well.

For Fred West, these actions weren’t about getting and having sex
per se. It was power and control that motivated West as he moved,
seemingly insatiably, from one kind of criminal sex act to another. This
horrific man wanted to rule everything and everyone he came into
contact with. In his home and on the streets, he made his own laws and
felt all should be subject to his decrees. But those whom he raped, from
his daughters to hitchhikers he brought to his cellar, said the sex acts
themselves lasted for a minute or two, even less. Fred, who wanted to
control everyone else, had very little control over himself. In one in¬
stance, after he performed for a few moments and had an orgasm early,
victim Caroline Owens reported to the courts and police that he began
weeping inconsolably. It wasn’t that Fred was sorry for what he had
done, nor was he ashamed of performing so poorly. Fred’s tears were a
kind of autonomic release, almost a reflex, totally uncontrollable. It
had nothing to do with heartfelt emotion.

Certainly he was devoid of any heart, soul, or conscience. What
kind of human being would take his daughter’s virginity? Then, when
Anna Marie turned thirteen, Rose made her pose for a photograph in
the nude, probably as a kind of advertisement for her to become a
prostitute like her mother. But, while it might be impossible to believe,
he became even more depraved. Fred’s daughter ITeather was not as

222 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

compliant as Anna Marie, and she wanted more than anything to es¬
cape her father’s constant fondling. She became introspective, silent,
and as Rosemary said, “stubborn.” Perhaps because of Fred’s abuse, she
shunned going out with boys, and Fred began to tell his cronies that
she was a lesbian. When Heather told others that she had been abused,
Fred beat her mercilessly. Then Heather announced that she was going
to leave Cromwell Street. And the sixteen-year-old disappeared. Fred
said she decided to strike out on her own. The reality was far worse.

Fred had confronted her in the laundry room, where she stood de¬
fiantly near the dryer with her hands on her hips. Fred confessed to po¬
lice, “She had a sort of smirk on her face like you try me and I’ll do the
business. I lunged at her . . . and grabbed her round the throat.”
Within minutes, she was dead. Armed with what he described as an
“ice saw,” he cut his daughter up in the first-floor bathroom. He sliced
around her neck and then began to twist off her head, no easy task. In
the middle of the night, he placed Heather’s two legs, her head, and
her body in a hole in the garden. Later he poured concrete to extend a
patio over her shallow grave. All of this was kept from Rosemary and
the family for years. As a cover, Fred constantly lied to Rosemary, say¬
ing that he occasionally heard from Heather, who had gotten a job and
was all right. I can’t tell you why he lied. I said all along that these peo¬
ple aren’t quite human. If I tried to say, Rose would have left Fred if
she knew Fred had killed Heather, it would be explaining it as if Fred
were an ordinary person like you and me. I can’t say why he lied be¬
cause I do not know.

When West completed one of these killing rampages, he sometimes
had sex with the dead body. As I have pointed out in previous chap¬
ters, Fred West, like John Gacy, may have exhibited signs of
necrophilia. But he was not a necrophiliac because, at its most basic,
necrophilia refers to having sexual attraction to corpses, not having sex
with them. I remember the case of a man who hired pale-looking pros¬
titutes to have intercourse with him in a coffin. Another example was
the case of a man who became sexually excited at funerals.

Nor was Fred a pedophile, because pedophiles desire to have sexual
relations with children. Nor was he purely a sexual sadist, because a

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 223

sadist doesn’t always kill. Did he hurt people? Yes. Did he get sexual
pleasure from hurting people, that same elation the average person gets
from sex with a lover in the missionary position? No.

Fred West was like a robot when he was compelled to torture and
rape and kill. Something clicked inside of him, something that even I
have yet to fully comprehend. His humanity wasn’t there any more as
he acted. I can’t say that he was a monster or an animal either. He was
on a kind of autopilot that led him from one level of crime to the next
until he succumbed to commit the ultimate crime, murder, over and
over again.

But what of Rosemary West? She, I believe, was one step up from
the empty shell in which the inhuman serial killer exists. She wasn’t
mentally retarded, but Dozy Rosie, as she was nicknamed at school,
seemed as though she was as she dutifully fulfilled all of Fred’s requests
of her.

It wasn’t so much that Fred brainwashed his wife. The best way to
explain the relationship between Fred and Rose is to imagine someone
sitting in front of a large television screen with a game controller in
hand. That controller is linked to Sony’s PlayStation II, and on the
screen is, say, the bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto III. The
video game is an alternate world, in the case of this game, a world of
crime bosses and bloody death. Here, as the player frantically mashes
the buttons to make things work on the screen, fantasies and adven¬
tures are experienced so enticingly that they almost feel real. Through¬
out the experience, there are prostitutes, tortures, maimings, guns, and
murders. When people play this game for hours at a time, they often
dream about the game at night.

For Fred West, his gift of gab was his controller and the star of his
video game, the person who moved around to do his bidding in this
world, was Rosemary West. He used her to realize not only his fan¬
tasies of the wife as prostitute as he watched her have sex with other
men. But he also used her to carry out and consummate acts of ab¬
duction, rape, and incest. In the video game, there are various missions
to complete before the user gets to the next level, which is always the
goal. If the mission was to abduct a young girl to be picked up at a bus

224 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

stop, Rosemary would help, perhaps by offering the woman some
nanny work along with room and board at 25 Cromwell Street. If the
mission was the act of rape, Rosemary would hold the woman down.
If Fred directed Rosemary to abuse the victim as well, she would do
so—without much fuss or semblance of protest. She would argue oc¬
casionally, but once she had this verbal release, she would always do
what Fred wanted her to do.

And in Fred’s strange world, reality merged with fantasy. Early in
his life, he dated a girl who was an amputee. Later in life, he would
make amputees of his victims. Early in his life, he worked as a skinner
and a tanner. And later, he would use this knowledge to cut up his vic¬
tims as if they were animals. Precisely how dreams melded into reality
for Fred West and other serial murderers, I do not know. But I will tell
you this: I am spending a good part of my professional life trying to
find out.

Why was Rosemary so obliging about doing things that most of us
would never consider doing, even if we were offered everything we’ve
ever wanted? There is evidence that both Fred and Rosemary were sex¬
ually abused by their own families, that Fred was molested by his
obese mother and that Rosemary was raped twice as a child. Fred may
have convinced Rosemary, as he tried to do with his daughters, that
there was nothing wrong with sleeping with his children. While Rose¬
mary was not exactly a blank slate, she was naive, willing, and not par¬
ticularly smart. It has also been said that because Rose’s mother had
electroconvulsive therapy—once more crudely known as electroshock
therapy—when she was pregnant with Rose, Rose became somehow
retarded. But a study done in 1994 of three hundred similar cases
showed no such thing. The most common complication was one that
occurred in twenty-eight of the cases, an arrhythmic heart rate, one
that was brief and didn’t recur once the baby was born. She wanted to
do right by Fred, even if doing right by Fred meant doing wrong in
the eyes of the law and society. Beyond this, Rose may well have been
bullied by Fred into believing that what she was doing was perfectly
all right. One of the things that psychiatrists know is that kids who
have been sexually abused can become more active sexually. For them,

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 225

sexuality becomes something that doesn’t have a real “do and don’t do”
moral code about it. It’s different when a couple like the Wests have
no boundaries. It would have been easier for them to sink into the acts
of incest. Throughout the years, Rose’s loyalty to Fred was seemingly
unshakable, even when the British constabulary showed up at Rose¬
mary’s doorstep after a child reported to her mother that one of the
West girls told her there was a body buried in the Wests’ backyard.
Though the police didn’t mention the tip, they asked difficult ques¬
tions about the disappearance of Rose’s daughter, Heather.

“When did you last see her?” “When did she move out?” “Why did
she move out?” “What was the buildup to her leaving?” were the ques¬
tions asked by Detective Sergeant Terence Onions.

And—

“Was there a row before she left?” “Who were her friends?” “Have
you seen her since?” “What inquiries have you made (about her disap¬
pearance)?”

Rose took umbrage at the invasion of her privacy and at the many
probing questions. “I can’t remember” was her favorite reply to Detec¬
tive Onions. And then, when she was hard up against the wall after
being hit with question after accusatory question, this frustrated, con¬
fusing answer: “If you had any brains at all, you could find her. It can’t
be that difficult.”

Their suspicions aroused, the police came back two days later to
begin digging up the patio and garden behind the house on Cromwell
Street while a nervous and sobbing Rosemary and the stunned children
sat around the kitchen table, drinking tea. As the digging continued,
Fred confessed to the police that they would indeed find Heather’s
body in the garden. After Fred was taken away to jail in late February
1994, Rose was arrested on suspicion of the murder of her young
daughter Heather. Even when Rosemary was taken into custody,
Stephen and Mae June, then in their early twenties, remained behind,
still drinking tea as the excavation continued.

Yet once Rosemary realized that Heather had been killed and
buried mere feet from where she slept, she wanted nothing more to do
with Fred. The realization of the murder had quickly shattered her

226 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

bond with him, and she was able to pull away from his Svengali-like
power over her. The fact that police uncovered five remains in less
than ten hours must have also jolted her into realizing that Fred had
been much more than a player of illegal sex games. He was the mur¬
derer of her child. The murderer of others, yes, but mainly the mur¬
derer of her child. While she would never implicate Fred, she would
never forgive him.

I believe Rosemary didn’t participate in the physical procedure of
murder. After looking at the evidence, it was clear to me that there
wasn’t enough of it to say for certain that she killed one or some of the
victims. I have no doubt that she committed sexual abuse of others
with Fred. However, after a trial full of high drama that included wit¬
nesses fainting from the strain of testimony, a jury speedily convicted
Rose on ten counts of murder. Though there was no direct evidence
presented in court, jurors believed the prosecution, which said she was
not only an accomplice but also a partner in the murders. She, not the
expired Fred, would be held responsible.

Fred’s and Rosemary’s deeds had severe repercussions far beyond
the murders. Some say the town of Gloucester never really recovered
from the blow it was dealt, not just to the economy but also to the col¬
lective psyche of its people. Fred’s daughter Anne Marie (who changed
her name from Anna—as if to rid herself partially of an unwanted tat¬
too) tried to commit suicide a few times, once jumping into the
muddy River Severn and nearly drowning before she was rescued.
Stephen tried to kill himself when the woman he loved left him. And
Fred’s brother, about to be brought to trial for allegedly participating
in the murders with Fred, took the lead from his sibling, hanging him¬
self in his jail cell. Rosemary, however, survives, still in her jail cell,
serving ten life sentences. She never revealed any more about the mur¬
ders, and remarkably, began a from-the-jail relationship with bass
player Dave Glover from the 1970s British rock group Slade. They
even prepared to be married, and Rosemary proudly announced their
strange bond in the British press. And then, suddenly within a week,
the marriage was off. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 227

once Slade heard about the possible prison nuptials, Glover was un¬
ceremoniously fired from the band.

Of course, there have been other such partnerships: Paul Bernardo and
Karla Homolka, well-off Canadians who raped, killed, and videotaped
together, including the rape and murder of Karla Homolka’s sister. Ian
Brady and Myra Hinkley axed their victims, then buried them in Sad-
dleworth Moor, a windswept part of England not far from the areas
made famous by the literary works of the Bronte sisters. David and
Catherine Birnie had their own “House of Horrors” in Perth, Australia.
Gerald and Charlene Gallego kidnapped and murdered ten people,
mostly teen girls, in and around Sacramento.

And then there was Alton Coleman and Debra Brown.

I spoke at length with Debra Brown, who with boyfriend Alton
Coleman cast a pall of thievery, rape, and murder over Illinois, Indi¬
ana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Wisconsin in the summer of
1984. The African-American pair traveled like the drifting Michael Lee
Lockhart, but their reign of terror was more of a short, intense binge.
It lasted fifty-three days and placed Coleman and Brown near the top
of the FBI’s most wanted list.

In his previous offenses such as rape, Colemans handsome looks and
nice-guy attitude on the witness stand turned juries in his favor, and he
often escaped the grasp of justice. With his mustache and long, carefully
trimmed sideburns, he looked more like an R&B star of the day than he
did a criminal. In 1983, he was charged with sexual assault after his sis¬
ter accused him of attempting to rape her eight-year-old daughter. But
the case never went to trial, as Coleman’s sister dropped the charges.
Coleman felt he was protected against all crimes he could commit, not
by a guardian angel, but by a Haitian voodoo god called Baron Samedi
he had heard about from his grandmother. Called both the god of eroti¬
cism and the lord of death, Baron Samedi is a mythical figure often de¬
picted with a stovepipe hat and a formal coat with tails who zealously
guards the entrance to the afterlife. Said to drink rum steeped in hot pep¬
pers, the dancing, laughing god is also seen as a protector of children and
the critically ill and is the latter’s last best chance at regaining health.

228 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

On June 18, 1984, Coleman and Brown spied bright-eyed and
carefree seven-year-old Tamika Turks and her nine-year-old aunt,
Annie, in Gary, Indiana. They were heading back from a candy store
when the pair coaxed them into taking a walk in the woods under the
ruse of playing a game. Away from witnesses and covered by the silence
of the woods, the two bound and gagged the children. When Tamika
whimpered, Coleman jumped up and down on her chest. In an even
more depraved turn, the pair forced Annie to carry out acts of oral sex
on both of them. Coleman cut and raped Annie, and the two choked
her until she passed out. When Annie came to, alive despite tremen¬
dous blood loss, she found Tamika’s body tossed in some shrubbery,
strangled and dead.

On July 13, Coleman and Brown bicycled to the home of an el¬
derly couple, Marlene and Harry Walters, in Norwood, Ohio, near
Cincinnati, claiming they wanted to purchase a camper in the yard.
The Walters invited the two in to have lemonade on that hot July day.
Once inside, they ransacked the place, stealing things they saw of
value. Coleman beat Harry and took to hitting Marlene with various
items, including a magazine rack, over twenty times. He also used a
pair of Vise-Grip pliers to disfigure her face and scalp before she died.
With the couple bound and tied, Coleman and Brown made off with
the Walters’ red Plymouth Valiant.

By the time they were apprehended, Coleman and Brown had com¬
mitted what amounted to a laundry list of crimes, including eight
murders, seven rapes, three kidnappings, and fourteen armed rob¬
beries. After a tip from one of Coleman’s acquaintances, police spied
the two in the bleachers of Mason Park in Evanston, Illinois. They
were casually watching a street basketball game.

But what were their excuses?

On the day he was born, Alton Coleman’s mother didn’t want him
and gave him up to his grandmother. (Another account says she threw
her baby into a garbage can.) Coleman’s grandmother wasn’t the most
stable influence a child could have, since she ran a brothel and a gam¬
bling parlor. She also beat him more than occasionally. Alton devel¬
oped slightly feminine mannerisms and the embarrassing habit of

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 229

peeing his pants. So the local kids, who constantly bullied him in
Waukegan, Illinois, came up with a nickname for him: “Pissy.” Later,
he would enjoy dressing in women’s clothing.

In an interview with Ohio Public Radio just weeks before his exe¬
cution in April 2002, Coleman blamed the Walters murder on Debra
Brown, claiming that she was “speedy, a little bit high . . . We was
drugged up.” He asserted that they ransacked the Walters’ house be¬
cause the pair wanted items to sell to buy drugs, and that Brown hit
Marlene repeatedly with a candlestick because Mrs. Walters kept fight¬
ing back. While Debra was no innocent bystander, it was extremely
cowardly but typical of Coleman to protest his innocence and blame
Brown in a last-minute effort to escape the death penalty.

Like Rosemary West, Debra Brown was considered a slow learner,
so that her intellectual ability was the equivalent of that of a child. Like
Rosemary West, she was very much under the thumb of the dominant
Alton Coleman. If he told her to go out and get a bag of potato chips
in a downpour without a raincoat, she would do just that. And if he
told her to kill, she would do just that.

Before my conversations with Debra, I had seen a black-and-white
photo of her. She wore a Pennzoil baseball cap placed at an angle on
her head, her face tough and hardened, albeit youthful. She would tell
a judge that she “had fun” killing, then tempered the statement by say¬
ing she was kinder, more understanding and “more lovable” than peo¬
ple believed her to be. On the surface, she seemed very cocky, even
brazen, but I found Debra to be a very quiet, relatively passive, yet oc¬
casionally hostile person.

“Why are you here?” she whispered. “I’m not crazy.”

I could tell that she indeed was not crazy. Instead, she was in love.
“I just want to ask you some questions. Can you tell me a little bit
about Alton?”

Her eyes immediately brightened, almost as if thinking about him
made her free of prison. “There’s nothing wrong with Alton. Alton’s
the best thing in my life. From the minute I met him.”

“Are you in love with him?”

Softly, she said, “You bet I am. I’d do anything for that man.”

230 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“Anything?”

“Just about.”

“What about the bad things you did?”

“If I did anything, I did it because Alton wanted me to.”

“People were killed.”

“Alton took me everywhere. We went all around. All kinds of cars.
It was fun. We had fun.”

“How upset are you about what’s happened to Alton?”

“What do you think? I’m upset. Damn upset.”

“Why?”

“What we had was . . . different. It was exciting. He took me every¬
where. He took care of me. Now, who’s gonna do that?”

“What about Marlene Walters?”

“Well.” There was a long pause and she lowered her head a bit. “I
did that.”

“You?”

“Not Alton. Me.” She was so small and subdued, and so very much
in love that I did not believe her. I felt she was covering for Alton be¬
cause she didn’t want him to die by lethal injection. Psychiatrists could
call the partnership of Alton and Debra one that was “enmeshed.” She
felt she couldn’t function without the other person, or at least what she
saw as the vivid memory of how well they seemed to work together.
Somehow she could deal with his incarceration, but she couldn’t bear
to think about his death.

It was the kind of thing I’ve seen in little kids when they’re clinging
so much they can’t be independent from the parent figure. In addition,
Debra was like the mousy person in a relationship who can’t even seem
to move without the permission of the other. Recently Zits, the comic
strip about the misadventures of a mom and dad with one teen and
one college-age son, ran a series about a couple in a relationship who
breathed the same air. They were constantly on each other. Each could
not and would not survive without the presence of the other person.
That was what the love between Alton Coleman and Debra Brown was
like. Not unlike Rose West, Debra accepted what was going on around
her. When something like the legal system threatened that relation-

Rosemary West and Partners in Serial Crime | 231

ship, she got very upset about it. But she wasn’t about to do anything
about it—because someone else, Alton, had always been the aggressor.

In my mind, the only way Debra could have committed the violent
killing of Mrs. Walters (remember, there were over twenty powerful
blows that pummeled her) was if she had been doing crack at the time
of the murder. Crack is one of the very few drugs that has been known
to have the potential to increase the level of violence a human may do.
Debra may have had a little speed and some marijuana on that fateful
day in Ohio, but that wouldn’t have led her to carry out such a vicious
crime. She would need to have been far more irate, and much stronger.
Yes, I saw that she had been described as a mean little witch who could
lash out verbally, but she was not a brutal murderer.

To me, the partnership killings are like a transmogrification of what
John Gacy and even Michael Lockhart had said, that there was always
someone there in the room helping them kill. For Gacy, it was Bad
Jack. For Lockhart, it was Jamaican people involved in illegal drug
deals said to have been in the hotel room with Officer Ffulsey. For us,
these demons are clearly figments of the imagination, but to them,
there really was somebody else there. To some, delusions are real. In the
instances of the helpers of Alton Coleman and Fred West, the partner
was no imaginary being. She was real, a warm, submissive body there
to be directed in living color, not an enabler who stood by and let it
happen or a disciple as if she were part of a cult. She was as real, close,
and attached as an arm or a leg. But though they were attached in that
way, serial killers don’t make terrific husbands. They’re not really lov¬
ing, caring, or understanding. They don’t share in the hopes and
dreams of their spouses. And, with the exception of Rose West, the
marriages don’t last long at all. The comment I often get from the
wives and former wives is that the serial killer husband wasn’t around
that much or didn’t care that much. That’s why these marriages ended.
So these were no mystical bonds that could last an eternity. If they
hadn’t ended before, they certainly ended when the murderer was con¬
victed in court. So why do some of them, like Debra Brown, say they
were deeply in love? It’s probably due to a combination of adequate sex
and cold experimentation that was misinterpreted by the partner as the

232 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

wild adventure of two people together against society. And that misin¬
terpretation may well have become the partner’s idea of love. It didn’t
matter that the serial murderer came home late at night or ignored
them completely or put work or murder or feeding the dog before love.
The stark reality? There was no love at all.

Why didn’t the partners become victims themselves? If they were
concrete extensions of the murderer like arms or legs, the murderer
wouldn’t see them as potential victims, just as part of himself. But one
thing is certain about the partners. There was a hole to be filled inside
of Rosemary, Debra, and the others, an emptiness, and it was filled by
these dominant murderers. It’s almost as if they were reaching out to
grasp in their partners something that they didn’t have inside of them¬
selves. It’s not that they were looking for someone to treat them badly,
not at all. They felt they had found a stable force, a man they could, at
any time, come to for fulfillment. They may have even made a pre-
conscious decision that the badness in their men didn’t override the
comfort they felt in being sheltered and protected. But the women in¬
volved in the partnership killings were beyond sad; it’s tragic that Rose
or Debra or any woman could feel complete only with a lying serial
murderer by her side.

FOURTEEN

THE INTERNATIONAL

Phenomenon:

CHILD KILLER IN RIO

I t was Thanksgiving 2002. I usually go all-out for the holidays,
inviting twenty or more people over to our place in Chicago. For
weeks before the big day, I take care to prepare all of the food myself,
crepes with mushrooms and chives, salmon rolls, homemade cheddar
cheese sticks, butter patties in the shape of turkeys, homemade gravy,
and, of course, two twenty-five-pound turkeys. It’s a great feast for
everyone, and with the combined demands of my medical work, fam¬
ily, and the food preparation, I don’t get much sleep from Halloween
on forward. But all the work is worth the effort once everyone sits
down to enjoy the feast and just talk.

But in 2002, Thanksgiving was very different.

A few days before the holiday, I received the long-distance call I was
waiting for, only I had expected it to come in September around Labor
Day, not during the Thanksgiving break. The call came from Brazil,
and my intermediary there reported that Brazil’s most notorious serial
killer was ready to talk to me. Although I had spoken to him before in
the 1990s shortly after he was captured, I had been waiting a decade

234 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

to sit down again with the killer of fourteen young boys. And so, when
the call came, it didn’t take long to make a decision: for me, there was
no other choice. I forgot about “over the river and through the woods”
and the bracing chill of the Chicago wind that’s perfect for the holiday,
and I used up a hefty chunk of our frequent-flier miles to make quick
reservations for a trip that would take us to Sao Paulo and Rio de
Janiero. Since the kids were home for the holiday, I packed them up,
and my husband too. We’d all make the best of it, I thought, and I’d
have a working vacation of sorts.

The kids knew nothing of the real purpose of the trip and they’d
occupy themselves by exploring the islands, swimming, and fishing. By
now, they did know that I sometimes talk to murderers, but I’ve told
them nothing more specific than that. At the age of fifteen, my oldest
son had actually seen me on television speaking about the abduction
of Elizabeth Smart, but he didn’t ask any further questions. And I
won’t offer answers. I trust he’ll let me know when he wants to know
more details about my career, as will my younger son.

On the plane, I read a story that quoted a true-crime writer who
said that there has been a conspicuous increase in the incidence of se¬
rial murder in countries whose political landscape has recently
changed. He pointed to Russia, Brazil, and South Africa as examples
where regimes had evolved into more democratic, more open, more
permissive societies and where serial murderers have been on the rise.
But this is a lot of bunk. Regimes, presidents, and policies aren’t the
reasons for serial crime. Serial murderers are everywhere, but in some
countries, we just don’t hear about them. It may also be true that the
lack of a free press in China or Russia diminishes the number of re¬
ports about serial crime. In any event, serial murder is an international
phenomenon.

In the village of Rostov in the Ukraine beginning in 1980, for ex¬
ample, Andrei Chikatilo ate some of the sexual organs of the people he
murdered. All of Russia was horrified. It’s interesting to note that it was
fairly common during World War II (and even before) for everyone
from children to grandmothers to consume the bodies of the dead to
prevent famine. During the height of the famines, people were even

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 235

killed for their flesh. There simply was no food anywhere to be found
in the more rural areas, whose landscapes were white, frigid tundras.
Chikatilo witnessed and lived through these times; in fact, his mother
told him that his brother was eaten for food. Of course, Andrei him¬
self did not kill because he longed for a politically different time in the
Soviet Union, when he could eat people without fearing that the au¬
thorities would crack down. Nor did he kill and eat to avenge his
brother or as vengeance for his sexual inadequacy (though the latter
was his explanation in court). There were many people in Russia who
had to resort to cannibalism just to keep from starving, and none of
these became serial murderers. So it can’t be said that what Chikatilo
saw, horrible as it was, led him to kill or to eat the sex organs of his vic¬
tims.

As the crude killer watched from a cell in the courtroom, his ac¬
cusers screamed at him, chastising him. On his face was not the look
of repentance. Moreover, during the testimony of witnesses and offi¬
cials, he looked up at the ceiling as if to ask, Why are they oppressing
me? Then he dropped his drawers and underwear to expose himself
and said, “Here, take this if you want it.” I believe Chikatilo was med¬
ically insane, and society was not to blame. However, during a lengthy
trial from April to August 1992, the point was driven home again and
again: Chikatilo was ruthless and sane; he knew what he was doing,
and he even took pleasure in what he did. Two months later, the Rus¬
sian judge found him guilty of fifty-two murders. Chikatilo’s life was
taken by an executioners bullet to the head in early 1994.

I thought about the many places to which I’d traveled to learn more
about serial murderers, particularly India, and its Golden Triangle,
which includes Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. From the colorful mosaics near
the vibrant bazaars in Delhi to the historic marble minarets to the lush
green gardens at the tomb of Akbar to a ride on the back of an ele¬
phant, every inch of India is full of romance and mysterious, ancient
history, and, yes, poverty. In India, I heard the story of a beautiful
lower-caste woman known as the Bandit Queen (though she was not
royalty) and also as the Rebel of the Ravines. Phoolan Devi carried a
rifle and wore a red bandana and a belt of bullets slung over her shoul-

236 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

der . . . and killed twenty-two politically influencial landowners in an
uprising in the town of Behmai in 1981. It was one of the biggest
slaughters modern-day India has ever seen. Devi’s sometimes consid¬
ered a serial killer here in the United States, but she killed for political
reasons, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor like a female
Robin Hood. After serving an eleven-year jail sentence, she became a
much-loved politician in the Indian Parliament, fighting for the rights
of the lower castes. She was not insane at all, as her motive included
vengeance to punish the upper-caste men who gang-raped her, and the
men of Behmai who watched them do it. She was in no way a serial
murderer. In 2001, Devi was murdered herself by a man wearing a
mask outside her house, killed by a man who later said the murder was
retribution for the massacre in Behmai. In India, many consider Devi
to be a great hero to this day.

In the late 1990s in the Punjab city of Lahore in Pakistan near the
Indian border, Javed Iqbal took an iron chain and choked, sexually
abused, cut up, and threw the remains of a hundred street kids into
vats of acid. He is said to have had three accomplices. The paunchy,
giggling Iqbal, who wore a preppy-style pullover sweater and geeky-
looking glasses when posing for cameras, turned himself over into the
hands of editors at a local newspaper, proclaiming, “I could have killed
five hundred.” Like Robert Berdella, Iqbal kept a detailed diary of his
deeds. He also kept many of his victims’ shoes, eighty-five pairs of
them, probably as souvenirs. An adamant, angry Judge Allah Baksh of¬
fered up an eye-for-an-eye sentence in which Iqbal would be cut into
one hundred pieces and put in acid before a crowd of people. But it
wasn’t to be. Like Fred West, Iqbal killed himself in his cell before Pak¬
istani justice was served. Serial murderers rarely commit suicide. Could
it have been that the structure of prison life led West and Igbal to ex¬
perience some kind of coming together in their personalities to make
them more humanlike? And when their personalities came together,
could they have seen the horror of what they’d done? Could this “new
human-ness” have led to their suicides? I have no real answer, but it’s
an interesting question to think about.

The Japanese are reticent about many things, including cancer.

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 237

Until several years ago, they considered even speaking the word to be
taboo. A Japanese friend of ours who was stricken with the disease re¬
fused even to utter the word, as did the family around him. It was as if
by merely saying it, the cancer would spread further. And this friend
might have known better—he was a physician. The Japanese are also
silent about serial killers. The 1988 case ofTsutomu Mizayaki stunned
the residents of Tokyo. He abducted, mutilated, and killed little girls
as young as four years of age and no older than seven, and called the
killings a dream from which he had never really awoken. Five months
after killing one child, he burned the body and dropped the remains,
enclosed in a cardboard box, in front of her parents’ house. He con¬
sumed the flesh from the roasted hands of another victim, and claimed
he began murdering after he saw visions of “rat people.” Like other se¬
rial killers, he at one point professed that his confessions were obtained
forcibly by members of a violent police force. Mizayaki, whose voice
never rose above a whisper in court, complained that police kept hit¬
ting him on the head to coax a confession. While his lawyers tried to
convince the judge in Tokyo that Mizayaki was insane at the time of
the killings, in April 1997 he was sentenced to death.

One country that is terribly ill equipped to identify or admit to the
presence of serial killers is China. Some reports in magazines like Time
have suggested that the reason (again!) for the upsurge in serial crime
is related to the slight loosening of restrictions in a post-Chairman
Mao era that seeks to open society a bit more than the old hard-line
Communists permitted. Hua Ruizho, for instance, found prostitutes
near the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in the capital of Beijing. Ruizho
spirited them away in his van, raped them, killed them, and took the
bodies to garbage dumps. He was executed in 2002. Another killer, se¬
curity guard Duan Guocheng, murdered thirteen women, cutting off
the breasts of some. On the run, Duan evaded police for months in
2001 by sleeping in flea-bitten hotels that cost a few dollars each night.
Time reported that the network of communications among cities to
which police have access was less than stellar. The idea of miscommu-
nication among Chinese authorities is not a problem exclusive to the
Chinese. It happens to this day in the United States to a lesser extent,

238 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

possibly because China’s communications infrastructure isn’t as ad¬
vanced as is ours. I’m quite sure that China always had serial killers in
the time of Mao; they just were not reported to the police or to jour¬
nalists, or officials kept the murders quiet and they weren’t talked
about. Wherever serial murders occur in the world, it’s important for
all governments and law enforcement agencies to be completely open
and to share information, so citizens can learn more about this ever¬
present danger. Otherwise, the problem will continue . . . and grow.

Once we got off the plane and took a cab to the city, we were immersed
in the dusty, noisy chaos that is always Sao Paulo, the world’s second
largest city. Nearly seventeen million people live here, many of them in
the favelas, the ghettos within the cities of Brazil.

Shortly after we settled in, the phone in our room rang: Marcelo
Costa de Andrade, the serial killer, was having second thoughts about
talking with me. He also made the request for ten thousand dollars for
his time, which staggered me. I was crestfallen. Great. I had made the
five-thousand-mile trip to Brazil, and I was expected to wait at the
whim of a serial killer, at that. Why did I even begin to believe that he
would be forthcoming? After all these years, why did I think anything
would be different? Serial killers specialize in manipulation. While he
sat in his cell making his grand decision, we decided not to wait
around. Packing up the kids, we drove to Paraty, a little-known but
beautiful fishing village on the ocean about two hours by car from Rio.
We found that Paraty has sixty-five islands and three hundred beaches
in the area to explore. Fishing and eating, we had a fine Thanksgiving
time, Paraty style.

Occasionally, among the colorful tropical parrots and chirping tan-
agers, I would sit alone in the courtyard of our pousada and think
about Marcelo Costa de Andrade. Nearly a decade ago, when I was in
Rio for a neurology conference, I had seen a dramatic headline
splashed across one of the tabloid newspapers about a twenty-five-year-
old murderer who sometimes drank the blood of his victims. Because
my Portuguese isn’t very good, I asked a colleague to translate for me.

I began to hear a startling story of the downtrodden favela in Rio

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 239

called Rocinha where Marcelo lived. The word Rocinha means “little
field,” and it’s located on a mountain called Two Brothers, but the place
is far more ominous than the names would indicate. From where I was
staying, I could look up on the impoverished city within a city made up
of dwellings haphazardly constructed of drab concrete blocks, tin roofs,
and wooden shacks. It was like a medieval town, without running
water, plumbing, and often without electricity (unless someone illegally
tapped into it). Back then, the only time a member of the upper or mid¬
dle class would venture into Rocinha was to buy drugs or sex. But they
can’t or won’t stop the drug lords that rule high in the hills, nor will they
clean the canal reeking with raw sewage that constitutes the area’s main
water supply. In Rocinha, it’s as though the nearby famous tourist towns
and beaches of Ipanema are a planet away. Like many of the children in
Rocinha, Marcelo lived a life full of violence, abuse, and hunger. Like
Alton Coleman, he was beaten regularly by his relatives, sometimes so
hard that he was dizzied and stunned by the blows. By the age of four¬
teen, he had begun to work as a prostitute. Soon he began a long rela¬
tionship with an older man, with whom he eventually resided, but it
was a utilitarian relationship during which his life became easier and
better than what he had in the favela. He was fed, clothed, given gifts,
and went to movies occasionally.

At the age of seventeen, Marcelo would listen endlessly to tapes of
his brother crying (why, I don’t know), and then tried to rape the same
ten-year-old brother, with whom he lived. When the relationship with
the older man ended, Marcelo returned to his mother and began an
honest, if badly paying, job handing out flyers advertising various
items for sale in a Copacabana shop. Marcelo seemed to be making
every effort not to stray from a straight and narrow path that might
eventually lead out of the favela. Attending church regularly, he and his
mother now lived in the more rural but still downtrodden town of
Itaborai, twenty-four miles from Rio, where horse-drawn carts are still
common. It’s horrifying but not so strange that parents of abused chil¬
dren refuse to believe such abuse could happen. She may even have had
her own need, whatever that was, to keep Marcelo around, so she let
the abuse pass.

240 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

The churchgoing became more frequent, as often as four or five
times a week for four hours each night at the Brazilian-founded Uni¬
versal Church of the Kingdom of God, a sect that claims evil spirits are
the roots of all troubles. They believe that depression and fear are caused
by demons, and exorcisms are not uncommon within the church.
Among their tenets is the notion that the church can cure illnesses like
AIDS . . . and the “illness” that the church calls homosexuality.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God had been called sus¬
pect by many since its inception in 1977 because of its unusual prac¬
tices. Leaders of the church have been investigated for alleged links to
Colombia drug cartels. In Brazil, the group controls well over a dozen
TV stations, over thirty radio stations, even a soccer team named Uni¬
versal, and members of the church hold high political office. Also in
Brazil, some church leaders under came investigation by the govern¬
ment for possible fraud. None of the group’s teachings, however,
preach murder in the name of God in any way.

As I’ve indicated, religion is a major part of growing up in Brazil,
and it infuses everything people do. It’s more than merely following
certain rituals for an hour or so on Saturday or Sunday. In Brazil, prac¬
ticing religion is considered to be as essential to life as is breathing the
air. I wouldn’t say that de Andrade was overpowered by religion, how¬
ever. No church—in fact, no religion of this earth would have been
able to stop Marcelo from acting on the catalysts that lurked deep
within his own afflicted mind.

The Brazilian tabloid press began to call de Andrade a vampire
because he drank the blood of the children he murdered. They had
begun to call him a “monster,” making him bigger than life. It was
clear to me that Marcelo was about to become Brazil’s most infamous
serial murderer. Yes, later there was Sao Paulo’s Francisco de Assis
Pereira, who was charged with murdering nine women in 1998, and
Larete Patrocinio Orpinelli, a drifter who was said to have killed ten
children over a twenty-year period and who confessed in 2000 after
having repeated nightmares about his crimes. But Marcelo killed
quickly over a nine-month period in 1991, and he raped the chil¬
dren, had sex with the bodies, and sometimes drank human blood. It

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 241

was like nothing that the good people in modern-day Brazil had ever
seen before.

The boys whose lives were ended by Marcelo were kind of like The
Runts gang portrayed in the sad and violent Brazilian movie City of
God, which was based on a true story. These children lived on the
streets of the favelas, hustling and begging, holding up little stores or
mugging passers by to make their wages or, if they were “lucky,” run¬
ning about as messengers and lookouts for the drug lords in an effort
to become drug lords themselves one day. Their lives, in a sense, were
dead-end lives, but they were precious human lives nonetheless. Chil¬
dren do end up missing in the favelas of Rio (which hold one and a
half million people), sometimes at the hands of vigilantes who have
had enough of the robberies, sometimes at the hands of drug lords dur¬
ing turf wars. But these children, poverty stricken or delinquent, deserve
better. These children, one of whom was just six years old, deserved
to make their way in life, whether it was in or out of Rocinha.

One thing that continued to annoy me was the way the press fo¬
cused on the blood drinking. Earlier in this book, I pointed to the life
of Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess who drank and bathed
in the blood of her servants in the 1500s in a bizarre effort to remain
young. In his fairly dry but still widely published 1886 book Psy-
chopathia Sexualis, German neuropsychiatrist Richard von Krafft-
Ebing profiled over two hundred cases of such sexual oddities—
including blood drinkers like vampires and werewolves. Krafft-Ebing
made clear that the primitive need to drink human blood has a history,
a long history dating back to the caveman and cannibalism, and it cer¬
tainly pre-dates the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But Marcelo
was no vampire. In reality, only twice did he drink his victims’ blood.

In early 1992 in Rio, I lost no time in trying to arrange a meeting
with Marcelo. I didn’t really believe it would happen while I was there,
but I felt it was important that I give it a try. What if Marcelo could
tell me something the others hadn’t? What possibly might be lost if I
didn’t get to him? By sitting down with de Andrade, could I possibly
find another significant piece of the serial murderer puzzle? I had to
find out.

242 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

It took a few days, but through an affable go-between who was a
well-regarded and well-connected doctor in Rio, I got word that
Brazilian officials would indeed permit me to speak with Marcelo. Still,
there was one looming problem: my difficulty with the Portuguese lan¬
guage. My trusty intermediary helped me in tracking down a transla¬
tor, and we set off for the prison in Rio, a run-down two-story stucco
affair with wooden shutters over the bars that, compared to American
prisons, wasn’t particularly secure. Additionally, vigilance wasn’t as
high. Guards were not watching Marcelo’s every move (and in later
years, he did make an escape, although he was reapprehended) as they
do with serial killers here in the United States.

The sprawling country of Brazil imprisons more people than any
other country in Latin America, and its prison population has doubled
in the last five years. As I was led through the halls, I saw no visible
signs of abuse, although the conditions were less than what Americans
would call sanitary. Overall, the jail I visited was not a hellhole by any
means, but within its humid interior I would see the occasional cen¬
tipede creeping or cockroach scurrying by on walls whose paint was
peeling.

The officials in Rio were a bit taken aback by my presence, won¬
dering, “Who is this blond woman from the North, and why is she
here?” But they were fairly polite and led me to de Andrade without
hesitation. In a small, windowless room, there he sat at a rough-hewn
wooden table, shackled, looking younger than his twenty-five years.
While Marcelo was marginally younger than other serial killers, people
in Rio don’t have the extended adolescence that we have here. They go
to work sooner and don’t stay in school as long. Marcelo grew up more
quickly than a serial murderer in, say, Illinois would have. So it wasn’t
exceptional that his rampage came a bit early.

De Andrade himself was dark and round-faced, but calm, reserved,
and almost resigned to his circumstance. His brown eyes appeared
earnest as he tried to answer questions through the translator.

“What was it like growing up in Rio?”

“We were very poor,” he answered softly.

“It must have been difficult.”

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 243

He hunched forward and looked at the table. “We are so poor that
we must do anything we can do to survive.”

“What does ‘anything’ mean?”

Marcelo sat silent for a minute. Then he scratched the back of his
head and said, “I made money on the streets,” he said, referring to
working as a prostitute. Prostitution is close to being a sanctioned oc¬
cupation in Rio, a place that’s much more open about sex and sexual¬
ity than we are here in the United States.

It may have been difficult for Marcelo to prostitute himself initially,
but it was difficult for him to live at home as well. “And then, after I
worked, when I would come home, I was hit. My stepmother some¬
times would not give me food.”

“What about going to school?”

He thought for a moment, stroking the light, few-days’ growth of
beard on his face. “There was not so much school for me in the favela.
There was just the street and everyone would try to make some money
on the street.”

“What was fun for you?”

“We all make things for Carnival. It takes a long time. It is not fun
always. It is work.” The people of Rio are obsessed with Carnival, the
entertainment-filled festival that precedes Lent, especially the great pa¬
rade with its grand costumes and floats that passes before at least
85,000 in the open-air Sambadrome. But I could see that for Marcelo,
the making of costumes for Carnival was not something that he took
much pleasure in doing—though everyone did it.

“What else do you like to do?”

“I like to ride a bike. Sometimes soccer. I like the sun. I would like
to see the sun again.”

It was a challenge for me to try to keep up a conversation because
the interpreter had to translate everything I would say and everything
Marcelo said. I felt I lost a bit of the rapport I usually have when I can
speak directly to a serial murderer. And I wondered whether the trans¬
lator was being accurate, especially as we moved into the more serious
parts of the interview. Yet I didn’t have time to be distracted. I forged
ahead and looked straight at de Andrade.

244 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

“Marcelo, you have done some bad things.”

“Bad,” he agreed.

“Do you know why you did these bad things?”

“The children have bad lives here. If they are children when they die,
they go straight to heaven. A better place.” I wasn’t buying it. I knew
there were cultural differences between the United States and Brazil. I
knew about his connection to the Universal Church. It’s no secret that
Christians are taught to look forward to an afterlife in heaven. But no
religion, certainly no Western religion, advocates murder, let alone the
murder of children. I didn’t make my feelings known and continued.

“Why did you take young boys?”

“They were prettier. To me.”

“What did you use to kill?”

“My hands. Once with a machete. My mother had it. I would say
that I was going for bananas. I cut off the head.” In this incident,
Marcelo had already killed and raped an eleven-year-old boy called
Odair Jose Muniz dos Santos, who he picked up while the child was
begging and who resisted his advances on a soccer field. He returned
to the scene to cut off the dead boy’s head.

“Why the head?”

“I wanted people to make fun of him in heaven.”

“Can you tell me more?”

“People used to make fun of me too. I did not want to hurt any¬
one. Sometimes I do not know if they are dead or alive. It was ... I
could not stop myself.” Again, it was like Michael Lockhart had de¬
scribed: something went awry and he was driven to kill.

“Why no one older than sixteen?”

“The adults, if they had sins, would go to hell. I did not want to
send anyone to hell. Children when they go, they go to heaven.” I
found all this ironic because he himself had killed so many people and,
according to the tenets of his religion, would be bound for hell once
he died as well. On the surface, his “logic” sounds reasonable, and
Marcelo would tell this story over and over again to police and to jour¬
nalists. But Marcelo had no real concept of religion. It was a complex
concept too abstract for him to grasp.

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 245

In a way, de Andrades use of religion as an excuse was like John
Wayne Gacy saying it was Jack Hanley who made him kill thirty-three
people in Illinois. Both were giving something to us so that we “nor¬
mal” humans can remark, “Oh, yes. That’s why he did it.” They hear
us desperately trying to make sense of their crimes, so they offer rea¬
sons, excuses, defenses. In general, people cannot deal with not know¬
ing the whys and hows.

How did Marcelo’s string of murders finally conclude? On Decem¬
ber 11, 1991, ten-year-old Altair and six-year-old Ivan Abreu received
permission from their mother to walk to a friend’s home to eat a meal
of fried fish and bread. As they strolled, the two were as excited about
eating as a child here would be to get a gift like a new toy. But when
they stopped at a bus terminal to ask passersby for spare change, they
met Marcelo. He promised that if they helped him light candles in the
church of St. George, he would give the boys 4,000 cruzeiros (then
about $20). It was a huge amount of money for boys who didn’t even
have a bed to sleep on. Marcelo made small talk as they walked and
even lifted Ivan and perched him on his back when he tired. Then,
when they reached a deserted beach, Marcelo grabbed Altair and began
kissing him. When Altair tried to run, Marcelo pushed the boy down
onto the sharp pebbles on the beach, where he hit his head and began
to bleed. Then Marcelo turned on Ivan, choking, raping, and killing
Ivan as Altair watched. Altair stood stunned, unable to move or com¬
prehend what he saw unfold before him. Then Marcelo moved toward
Altair and opened his arms wide. Altair felt he was about to die, and
he could literally smell his brother all over de Andrade. Surprisingly to
the young boy, Marcelo hugged Altair, as though nothing wrong had
occurred.

“Why?” asked Altair.

“I have sent Ivan to heaven.” De Andrade never used the words kill
or rape or death.

“I love you,” announced Marcelo, who then took Altair by the
hand. They spent the night together outside, on the ground in a thick
forest behind a gas station, away from any people, their presence ob¬
scured by plants and shrubbery. The next day, the boy was taken to

246 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Marcelo’s workplace, a jewelry outlet in Copacabana. His heart beat¬
ing fast, Altair was able to escape when Marcelo was distracted. Recall¬
ing the right buses to board, he returned to his mother, who informed
police about Ivan’s disappearance. Meanwhile, Marcelo returned to the
scene of the crime and placed Ivan’s tiny hands into the pockets of his
pants. He said he did this to save the boy’s hands from the gnawing
teeth of rodents.

When the police arrived at Marcelo’s shop a couple of days later, de
Andrade seemed to expect them, wondering aloud why they took so
long to arrive. Initially, Marcelo confessed to killing Ivan but no one
else. It took two months in jail, but de Andrade then told police about
thirteen more murders.

We had trekked back to Sao Paulo and dealt with the massive traffic
jams on the street and the smell of fuel emissions that intruded even
through our closed windows. Once we were back in the lobby of our
hotel, the desk clerk handed me a message from my intermediary, and
the news was not so good.

De Andrade had come down in price, but he still requested five
thousand dollars for a talk. Nearly hitting the roof, I was livid that I
had been duped and that I was gullible enough to have made my way
to Brazil for nothing. When I calmed down, I resigned myself to the
fact that at least it was a nice Thanksgiving vacation.

A five-thousand-dollar request from a serial killer is an obscene
amount to me and it borders on extortion. Yes, it has always been my
policy to make every effort to follow up with the people I have profiled
and interviewed to see how the prison system has changed them. Has
the person adjusted to prison life? What kind of life had the prisoner
made for himself within the prison, such as Gacy had made with his
paintings? Had he lashed out at another prisoner? (That’s a rarity; se¬
rial murderers rarely attack others in prison unless they themselves are
first set upon.) How was the confining structure of a Brazilian prison
beneficial or detrimental to the murderer?

But five thousand dollars! It was obvious to me that Marcelo
thought he had become a celebrity. Like the serial killers stateside, he

The International Phenomenon: Child Killer in Rio | 247

had gotten a kind of fan following, groupies who had written to him
and fawned over him. Probably, the people who run Internet Web sites
had gotten to him too. It’s ghoulish, but they sell everything from locks
of hair to handwritten letters procured from the murderers.

I have never paid to speak to a serial killer and I vow that I never
will. It’s not just the principle of the thing, it’s the questionable hon¬
esty and candor I would get by greasing a serial killer’s palms. He may
say something dramatic that he thought I wanted to hear just to earn
his wage. Another important consideration was this: offering any kind
of remuneration is never an ethical thing for a doctor to do. It’s the
kind of thing that could ruin a reputation, and it was silly for Marcelo
to think that I would agree to his unscrupulous demands. Finally, the
idea of paying money to someone who has taken the lives of children
is repugnant to me.

I knew I would encounter more obstacles before I really could dis¬
cover what makes a serial killer tick. And I still felt that, somewhere
down the line, I would get to de Andrade again. I’m no manipulator
in the way serial murderers are, but I do stick with things over time and
that tends to wear them down. With some of them, I have requested
interviews for over ten years. I just don’t give up . . . until they’re exe¬
cuted. Constant research is key in this business, and things have
changed dramatically since I started back in the 1970s. It was time to
consider the various advances in science that could well be used to help
the world discover who isn’t a serial killer . . . and who is. And who can
be stopped.

FIFTEEN

DNA AND THE
CjREEN RIVER KILLER

J ust as medicines and technologies change, so does the intricate
science that helps us to track down serial murderers. Over the
course of the next decades, that science will only become better and
more refined. To understand what I mean more fully, we have to back¬
track somewhat.

I remember that I stood in my beige raincoat on the precipice of a
deep ravine in the ever-present Seattle-area mist, cold and wondering
how and when the Green River Killer would be found. Carefully, I
walked around the crime scene, as I do with many of these cases, to try
and collect any missing pieces of information, and I peered over and
into the rocky abyss. This was one of the locations where he disposed
of the body after he killed. Could another body be near here?

I looked around for other clues the police might have missed in the
tall grass, but I saw nothing.

I did have my ideas regarding who the killer might be. My theory
held that the suspect was a white male who was married, and he was
in his thirties. He would be found working at a blue-collar job as a
truck driver or a factory worker, or some position that gave him the
opportunity to take time off pretty much whenever he desired to take

250 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

a break. The suspect would not be someone from very far outside the
area. In other words, the person knew Seattle and wasn’t a drifter. Ad¬
ditionally, he would be someone who wouldn’t stick out in a crowd: he
wouldn’t look like a killer. He would look like a normal guy, the same
kind of normal-looking guy that I have described throughout this
book. That normalcy would provide him a cover, like a cloak of pow¬
erful invisibility.

The Green River itself twists along a sixty-five-mile course that be¬
gins just to the southeast of Howard Hansom Dam inland and pours
into Elliott Bay just to the south of Seattle. To local fishermen, the
river is known for its rainbow trout, steelhead, and salmon. To the po¬
lice and the FBI, it became known as a dumping ground for corpses.

On July 15, 1982, in Kent, Washington, two boys stopped their
bicycles on the Peck Bridge to horse around, talk about fishing, and
look out over the water. As they chatted, they glanced down into the
Green River. There they saw the bloated body of sixteen-year-old
Wendy Lee Coffield, floating naked with a pair of her own jeans tied
around her neck. Police immediately deduced that she had been stran¬
gled. A few weeks later and just to the south of the Peck Bridge, an
employee of a meatpacking plant discovered something lying on a
sandbar. Thinking it to be a dead animal, the worker slowly moved
closer to examine the find, only to realize the unmoving hulk was
the nude body of twenty-three-year-old Lynne Bonner. She hadn’t
drowned: there was no water in her lungs. An autopsy revealed that
Bonner had been choked to death. Other similarities between the two
murders included these facts: both Bonner and Coffield were young
prostitutes who had tattoos.

The killer wasn’t finished. On August 15, 1982, a man enjoying a
Sunday respite leisurely rode on an inflatable raft down the Green
River’s slow current. He discovered not one but two more bodies in the
river. Once police arrived on the scene, they found yet another body in
the tall wispy grass on the riverbank, a body that was likely placed there
only a day before. Two of the five victims also had a rock inserted into
their vaginas. I wondered whether this was done to weigh them down.
Was there a sexual meaning that no one, not even the killer himself,

DNA and the Green River Killer | 251

could comprehend? Whatever the case, there was little doubt in the
minds of authorities that a serial murderer was the perpetrator of the
crimes.

The FBI’s top people from Virginia jetted to Seattle to try to help.
One felt the killer was very close to the police, not necessarily a cop,
but someone who had an interest in the doings of law enforcement.
The same person then said the killer was a fisherman or a hunter. An¬
other felt the killer was a sexual psychopath. There were agents who
speculated that there was more than one killer. Another thought the
murderer was a military man trained in intricate special operations. A
psychic even got into the act with her predictions.

The Green River Task Force was created to track down the mur¬
derer ASAP. With a team that included not only members of the FBI
and local detectives but also the specious from-the-cell “insight” of se¬
rial killer Ted Bundy, the task force sounded auspicious on the face of
it. But they were bogged down by infighting and rampant ego. Simi¬
lar chaos had reigned over Seattle’s Ted Bundy investigation a few years
before. Ironically, though the Green River Task Force was created to
avoid the same mistakes, one could argue that the quality of informa¬
tion retrieved by the Green River group was inferior to that gathered
for the Bundy investigation.

I thought I could help the task force and I gave one of the leaders
of the group (who had also worked on the Wayne Williams case) a call
to offer my help. The conversation was very short, the answer was as
abrupt and brusque as it was startling: “Not interested.”

One of the problems I’ve often seen with law enforcement is that
they become too territorial. They don’t want anyone messing around
or flying in to add new ideas or theories. And they don’t want anyone
else getting credit for the capture except themselves. Additionally, they
don’t understand how sitting and talking something through might be
helpful. They generally see a forensic psychiatrist as someone who’s in¬
volved only in the trial aspect of the case, someone who’s extremely bi¬
ased as part of the defense or prosecution teams. They couldn’t imagine
that I could be objective. Plus, I was seen as a civilian and not as part
of their closed circle. Did this narrow attitude affect the investigation

252 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

of the Green River Killer? It certainly didn’t help. I went to Seattle to
dig around anyway.

After I began profiling serial murderers, the FBI created its Behav¬
ioral Science Unit (and some members of the unit went to Seattle to
join the task force). But their goal was to assist law enforcement peo¬
ple in apprehending perpetrators. Behavioral scientists don’t do the
medical work that I do to discover what makes a serial killer commit
murder after murder. They’ll look at the external characteristics of the
person, and sometimes they get into a false way of “psychoanalyzing”
the serial murderer. They come up with ideas like: he hates his mother
and that’s why he murdered. But the ideas have no basis in scientific
research. They believe in simplicities like “wet the bed, start a fire, and
kill an animal, and you’ll become a serial murderer.*” It’s just too easy
an assumption to make.

Opinions about the Green River Killer’s profile varied widely
within the task force, and there were more and more of them as time
went by. At the same time, more and more dead bodies were found in
1982 and 1983 in locations beyond the Green River—closer to Seat¬
tle itself. Leads increased exponentially, but the task force had only
one primitive computer—and the information on it was lost when
there was a power outage. Over time, the FBI and the police proved
they could not track down the killer and the task force was scrapped.
With renewed hope, another task force was created in 1984 with over
forty people assigned to it. By then, skeletons and remains were found
as distant as forty miles away from Seattle. Later, authorities began to
believe the killer had murdered people as far away as Vancouver and
Oregon. While the task force had amassed thousands of pieces of ev¬
idence, only one percent of it had been properly analyzed. The need
to find the killer reached a fever pitch as months turned into years.
But the baffled authorities had no definitive answers. Some even

*An agent from the FBI told CNN about the serial murderer conundrum plaguing
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2003. The generalities the agent used in his profile after
months of investigation were almost of no use. He was “too smart to be caught,” “able
to lift 175 pounds,” “wore size ten or eleven shoes,” was “impulsive,” “determined,”
“nonthreatening,” and “white.” So much for the vaunted depth of behavioral science.

DNA and the Green River Killer | 253

thought Michael Lee Lockhart from Florida might have been the
Green River Killer.

Amid much media hoopla, King County Police Captain Frank
Adamson predicted that the Green River Killer would be brought to
justice in 1986. But the year came and went. With little success to
show for the years it had been in existence, the Green River Task Force
closed up shop in 1990. It wasn’t until 2001 that police apprehended
a suspect, after forty-nine murders had been committed. The beady-
eyed, mustached man was a Caucasian in his early fifties, Gary Leon
Ridgway of Auburn, Washington, a town a little over twenty miles
south of Seattle as the crow flies. The tagline the Auburn chamber of
commerce came up with for the sleepy town of forty-five thousand is
“More Than You Imagined.” Indeed it was—especially with a serial
murderer living there.

Ridgway was a quiet man, a journeyman painter who toiled at the
same company for thirty-two years and loved rooting around at flea
markets. Lie also occasionally bragged to friends about his exploits
with local prostitutes. In fact, members of the task force had picked up
Ridgway for soliciting a prostitute as far back as the early 1980s, but
they were never able to pin the murders on him. Though he was con¬
sidered a suspect in the murder of seventeen-year-old Maria Malvar in
1983, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. In 1986, Ridgway
even passed a lie detector test.

Over the course of twenty years, however, science has evolved in
breathtaking fashion. Perhaps the most important discoveries in the last
few years have come in the field of DNA and the mapping of the
human genome. Advanced DNA testing was what helped crack the case
of the Green River Killer in a way no law enforcement officer could. A
sample of saliva that had been retrieved from Ridgway by court order
in 1987 came up for DNA analysis in 2001 by using a method called
PCR, polymerase chain reaction. The groundbreaking test was invented
by University of California chemist Kary Mullis in the 1980s. In 1993,
Mullis won the Nobel Prize for his work, and since then, the test has
been refined and perfected enough so that forensic experts now trust it
more implicitly than any other current investigative tool.

254 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

What PCR testing can accomplish is nothing short of amazing.
Using a machine with a price tag of more than $50,000 and often
about the size of a small cube refrigerator, chemicals are used to sepa¬
rate the DNA’s double helix into two distinct pieces. These delicate
strands are placed into a solution of enzymes including the polymerase
and the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (mole¬
cules containing nitrogen that are the building blocks of DNA). The
two strands of DNA, the polymerases, then act like a kind of superad-
vanced copy machine. Under the right conditions, the chemical re¬
creates the DNA and makes a copy of it so there are a pair of double
helixes. Within a few hours, the PCR chain reaction can produce bil¬
lions of copies of the original DNA. The repetition was necessary be¬
cause many copies were needed to create a kind of map of Ridgway’s
genes. Once the map was in hand, comparisons could be made.

The DNA within Ridgway’s saliva sample was compared to the
DNA found on the dead bodies. Hearts skipped when researchers were
able to match up sequences of nucleotides that were unique to Ridg-
way and only to Ridgway. The possibility of a mistake was minuscule,
since the error rate for the test is one in three trillion. It wasn’t that au¬
thorities didn’t find DNA on the dead victims along the way. They did.
But the amount of DNA wasn’t enough to have been used in the fairly
unrefined tests that were available at the time.

So the authorities finally nabbed their suspect. Three heroic scien¬
tists worked a total of 640 hours obtaining the right DNA samples to
test and then used PCR to resounding success. When the news was an¬
nounced, one Seattle journalist told me, “There was a lot of
excitement—it seemed like a movie script, really. Here were these
seemingly ancient murders, and suddenly the legendary killer was un¬
masked and the whole country knew about it. It was hard to believe,
but little revelations kept pouring out, and it became more and more
real.” In early November 2003, an unemotional Ridgway pled guilty,
one by one, to forty-eight murders in exchange for a life sentence.
Reading from a statement before the judge and some of the families of
the deceased in a small courtroom, Ridgway said, “I’m sorry for killing
all those young ladies. I have tried to remember as much as I could to

DNA and the Green River Killer | 255

help the detectives find and recover the ladies. I’m sorry for the scare I
put into the community. I want to thank the police, the prosecuting
attorneys, my lawyers, and all others that had the patience to work
with me and to help me remember all the tragic things that I did and
to be able to talk about them.

“I know the horrible things my acts were. I have tried for a long
time to get these things out of my mind.

“I have tried for a long time to keep from killing any ladies. I’m
sorry that I put my wife, my son, my brothers, and my family through
this hell. I hope that they can find a way to forgive me.” That admis¬
sion made him the worst serial killer in United States history, and fam¬
ilies were up in arms. Most relatives of the murdered still wanted death
for Ridgway (one stated, “I’ll kill him myself”), but the state of Wash¬
ington has only performed a handful of executions since it initiated the
death penalty. You might ask, Well, if serial killers are addicted to
killing, why did Ridgway’s murders seem to stop in the 1980s? The fact
is, they didn’t stop. Ridgway probably killed many more. If you look
closer at the interviews he gave to authorities, Ridgway actually ad¬
mitted to killing sixty women. But authorities could pin only forty-
eight on him. Shortly after his plea of guilty, Snohomish County police
announced that they were looking at twenty additional unsolved mur¬
ders to gauge whether Ridgway may have been involved—especially
because Ridgway admitted he didn’t stop killing in the 1980s. Police
forces from San Diego to Canada are now looking at Ridgway as a pos¬
sible connection to their unsolved murders of women.

We have made much progress in understanding the mind of the se¬
rial murderer. In 1975 when I began my research, serial killers were
considered no different from mass murderers. But in my work on such
cases as the worst massacre in Australia, where thirty-five people were
killed (and eighteen injured) with a semiautomatic rifle in Port Arthur,
I’ve found that the difference is quite distinct. Port Arthur was a his¬
torical site in Tasmania, the location of a former penal colony. On the
afternoon of Sunday, April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant lunched at the
Broken Arrow Cafe on the grounds of the tourist attraction. After sit¬
ting down and eating, he removed an AR15 semiautomatic shotgun

256 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

from a blue gym bag and began shooting people. Twenty people died
and fifteen were wounded in the restaurant and fifteen more were shot
and died outside of the cafe and in locations nearby.

The mass murderer is a human who has a personality structure,
whereas a serial murderer really does not. As he readies to kill, the mass
murderer regresses from that personality to a very paranoid state. Be¬
coming suspicious, angry, and revengeful, he develops clear motives for
his murders. As he begins to shoot from a campus tower, from inside
the halls of a high school, or in a seaside cottage to kill many people at
once, he feels he’s getting back at somebody. Unlike serial murderers,
who are seen by neighbors to be nice and helpful, a mass murderer is
often said to be unusual, different, or odd. And the mass murderer
often dies in a battle with police or kills himself to avoid police (al¬
though Martin Bryant stayed alive and currently is serving a life sen¬
tence in Risdon prison). Serial murderers never commit suicide before
being apprehended, and they rarely kill themselves in prison. The mass
murderer has blamed society for his woes.

As I’ve written, my belief, my theory, is that society and parenting
and even accidents that injure the brain have little to do with creating
a serial killer. John Wayne Gacy’s father continually called him “dumb
and stupid.” Bobby Joe Long hated his mother. Ed Gein was obsessed
with his mother. Gilles de Rais had a thug of a grandfather who never
set the boy on the straight and narrow. But we humans are an adapt¬
able species, tougher and more resilient than we think we are. The ma¬
jority of people do not break down in the way serial killers break down.
People may be hurt or emotionally wounded by parents or society, but
they move on, some to become CEOs of large corporations, some sim¬
ply to have a family that is far more stable than the upbringings they
endured.

I am firmly convinced that there is something in the genes that
leads a person to become a serial killer. In other words, he is a serial
killer before he is born. He is a serial killer as he grows during those
nine months of nurturing in the womb, not yet influenced by the
words or deeds of parents, teachers, and caregivers. He is a serial killer
when he is a fetus, even as soon as sperm meets egg to create the genes

DNA and the Green River Killer | 25 7

of a new person. Those genes will create a disordered brain, a “dis¬
eased” brain that is predisposed to serial murder.

It’s almost too facile to say the brain is the most complex of human
organs, but it’s true. Franz Joseph Gall, the German-born scientist who
worked in the early 1800s, was considered the Newton of intellectual
physics and the creator of phrenology. He stated that “each of our feel¬
ings, our instincts, our intellectual and moral principles has, in the
brain, its own specific organ which can be seen on the surface in the
form of either a prominence or a Fossa, according to whether it is
highly developed or not, and the skull, faithfully reproducing the out¬
lines and sinuousity of the brain, also reproduces the configuration of
these various organs.” While the writing itself is a bit obtuse, the ec¬
centric Gall was on the right track in assigning specific activities to spe¬
cific parts of the brain. He did mistakenly believe those with a big
brain were more “powerful” than those with a smaller organ, and that
bumps on the head indicated what was going on inside the brain.
Today in my office, I keep a ceramic head that phrenologists used to
use. It reminds me not to go too far off in speculation without having
a good basis in fact.

With the discovery of the brain’s Papez circuit in 1937, science
really began to show the connection between emotion and bodily re¬
sponse. Simply put, the Papez circuit is the brain route senses take, the
result of which colors your emotions.

One of the first things a medical student learns in neuroanatomy
courses is that this Papez circuit affects part of the brain called the hy¬
pothalamus, which is a kind of a minibrain in itself. The hypothalamus
releases chemicals and hormones to the pituitary gland, which then re¬
leases them to the blood, where the chemicals have their effect on the
human body. In addition, the multitasking hypothalamus helps to
manage body temperature and the cardiovascular system. Many serial
murderers will complain or talk about being hypertensive or having
multiple autonomic symptoms, from sweating to rapid heartbeat to
vomiting to passing gas at the time of or just prior to the act of killing.
But not all people who have brain disease are violent, nor are all per¬
sons who are violent suffering from brain disease. While there’s not

258 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

space enough to detail the intricacies of the neurological functions of
the brain, I believe it’s important to understand that one of the pri¬
mary keys to understanding the serial murderer lies within the hypo-
thalmus and in the limbic system. To put it very simply, these parts of
the brain regulate emotions and moods.

Created by Professor Zang-Hee Cho in the 1970s, the process of
PET (positron-emission tomography) scans the brain to detect changes
in blood oxygenation and blood flow. After the patient is injected with
a radioisotope, the PET machine watches for the emissions of particles
called positrons from the decaying radioisotope in the brain. When the
positrons meet with electrons, photons are emitted, and the computer
is then able to create an image for study by researchers and doctors.
These pictures can tell quite a story.

In studies using PET, researchers induced emotions in patients by
asking what people thought about movies they had just seen. When
the brain patterns were studied, it was seen that happiness, sadness,
and disgust are associated with increased activity in the hypothalamus
and various areas of the brain that we can specify and target. I’d detail
each of the areas I mean, but truly explaining places in the brain like
the occipitotemporoparietal cortex would take a course of study in
school, not just a book.

Again, without becoming too technical, there are various chemicals
in the body that instigate emotions and lead to actions. For instance,
I’ve said throughout the book that one of the clues to understanding a
serial killer is that he has no social or psychological attachment. Killers
such as Fred West or Michael Lee Lockhart are like infants emotion¬
ally. Two substances, oxytocin and vasopression, have been seen as
being involved in attachment. Receptors have been located in the lim¬
bic system and in the brainstem. Could a serial murderer have an im¬
balance of these substances or a lack of receptor attachment in the
brain? These are just two of many substances that can lead a human
being to human action. Will we, sometime in the future, find one par¬
ticular chemical that is the serial killer chemical? I certainly hope so.

In the mind of the average person, decision making occurs at sev¬
eral levels of the central nervous system. At the highest level, the indi-

DNA and the Green River Killer | 259

vidual uses past experience and future predictions to choose a course of
action. At the lowest level, conscious decision making does not occur
until after the actions are performed. The latter is the state of mind of
the serial murderer. He is completely unaware of the process leading up
to murder.

In addition to the Papez circuit, there are various other “switches”
within the brain that create a cascade of events that lead a serial killer
to kill. In the mind of a serial killer, something goes wrong in the
switching process of these circuits. A multitude of factors, not the least
of which are these circuits, keep the neurochemicals in the brain usu¬
ally at levels that lead a person to function normally. To keep the brain
on an even keel, the circuits strike a very fine balance, but what tips
that balance? What makes that limbic system, the center of affect,
emotion, and action, go berserk? I am convinced that it’s in the genes.
In addition, there have not been any murders from serial killers until
they have become adolescents. I believe that the changes in adolescents
that make them become serial killers are in the neurochemical and
neuroendocrine changes that go along with puberty.

What we did initially in looking at the DNA and the genetics of
these people was very primitive. In the 1970s, I remember taking the
blood of Richard Macek and passing it on to a geneticist to analyze.
On reflection, how unrefined that process was. You could almost com¬
pare what we did in looking at early gene patterns with phrenology, be¬
cause we were saying, “Wow, look at the shape of this gene, does this
say anything?” We did not know how incredibly complex the internal
structure of each gene is. We were trying to do some pioneering work,
but look how far we’ve come since the 1970s. In thirty years, we’ve
made mammoth strides.

There are now ways to monitor the brain’s function that psychia¬
trists used to believe could be observed only through analytic explo¬
ration like talking therapy. Being able to single out a chemical like
oxytocin in the hypothalamus is only the very beginning. It doesn’t de¬
fine anything or answer anything, but it gives me a clue. Finding that
clue is a little bit like finding a clue when I’m on the trail of a serial mur¬
derer—it’s exhilarating and exciting. But much more work is needed.

260 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Scientists know a good deal about brain metabolism and function, but
then, where can these clues lead when it comes to serial murderers?
What in the brain and in the genes makes them addicted to killing?

Overseas in the Netherlands, geneticist Hans Brunner from the
University Hospital in Nijmegen has made a fascinating discovery.
One day, a young woman approached Brunner and said she was con¬
cerned about bearing children. During her conversation with Brunner,
she confessed to a history of brutal behavior in her family, like at¬
tempted murder. After testing, Brunner found that the woman’s fam¬
ily carried an unusual gene mutation, a preponderance of the substance
monoamine oxidase A. This enzyme stopped transmissions in the
brain that are essential in maintaining tranquility and contentment,
and the presence of the enzyme led the brain to refuse to break down
serotonin. An excessive amount of serotonin may well cause a person
to lash out with destructive behavior. Hans Brunners discovery is just
another small, important piece of the puzzle in the picture of the
causes of violence.

I’ve attempted to run various tests with the permission of the serial
murderer and of the government. Consistently, I’d like to run the
whole gamut of genetic, biochemical, neurological, and neurochemical
testing—including some cerebrospinal fluid-sampling studies. Cere¬
brospinal fluid guards the brain and spinal cord, and it takes chemicals
on their rides through the central nervous system. Testing is a relatively
easy process in which a local anesthetic is rubbed onto the area be¬
tween the third and fourth vertebrae on the lower back and the doctor
takes a needle to remove samples of the fluid. The pain involved is
minor, but there may be a headache after the procedure is completed.

The testing would also include the implantation of deep brain elec¬
trodes, the output of which I would follow over periods of time. This
does require surgery, which includes placing electrodes in the brain
that are joined to a battery via a wire placed underneath the skin. In
most cases, the battery is turned off at night. The risk of any possible
bleeding in the brain is low—between one and two percent. Data sug¬
gest that the implantation of electrodes has no long-term side effects,
and the electrodes can be removed at a later date.

DNA and the Green River Killer | 261

In other words, this is long-term testing that would be conducted
with the prisoner within the prison system. Some might say, well,
you’ve said the serial murderer acts different within the structure of
prison than he does in the less structured environment in which he
commits his murders. But even if he were in a structured prison situa¬
tion, such tests would give me a good baseline as to how an individual
reacts to certain situations, from work in the kitchen to prisoners that
don’t particularly like him to dealings with visitors like family. If I see
an external change, has there been an internal change to go along with
it? Long-term testing is the way to find out.

Testing doesn’t mean the prisoner would be constantly tethered to
anything. But I would want to monitor electrical patterns and neuro¬
chemical patterns in the brain. Doctors already do this on patients who
aren’t incarcerated. Again, I’m not suggesting cutting into his skull to op¬
erate on his brain in an effort to change the way his brain functions. I just
want to gather important information that the brain is telling me, infor¬
mation that occurs naturally in the course of the prisoner’s everyday life.

I would be remiss if I didn’t explain that there are legal obstacles to
overcome with all of this. They’re not obstacles that stem from the serial
murderers themselves. Usually the murderers are all for testing, as they
often express how exploration will help them to understand themselves
and their murderous deeds, deeds they sometimes cannot remember.
Over the years, I’ve approached lawyers, judges, and legislators to gauge
their opinions over coffee or at fancy fund-raisers. I’ve even suggested
that a law be passed to allow testing of serial killers. Sometimes I’ve re¬
ceived blank stares. Sometimes I’ve been laughed at. Sometimes I’ve dealt
with angry responses. Sometimes they’ve cited a litany of case law.

The courts themselves have been very clear on the subject. Judges
in many states have ruled that the prisoners don’t have the free will to
participate in the studies I propose simply because they are prisoners,
thus incapable of exercising free will. Therefore, the state thinks for
them in these matters, and the state says no to testing. The American
Civil Liberties Union would likely pitch a huge fit even if the states
agreed to testing, saying that the individual’s freedom to agree or dis¬
agree would be impinged upon.

262 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

Yet when I look at a movie like Minority Report, I wonder what the
future might hold. In the film based on a short fiction by Philip K.
Dick, Tom Cruise is a kind of detective in the year 2054 who is able
to use technology and psychic beings called “Pre-Cogs” to capture
killers before they kill.

I sometimes wonder whether our knowledge of DNA may someday
prevent serial killings, but not in the dramatic way the characters in
Minority Report prevented killings. Any person can already submit a
DNA sample by simply brushing some skin from the cheek or by giv¬
ing blood samples to companies like Kimball Genetics. They can di¬
agnose predisposition to illness in the average person for a fee,
everything from inherited mental retardation to periodontal disease. A
Florida company called Applied Digital Solutions offers the VeriChip,
a tiny device about the size of a grain of rice. Implanted under the skin,
it is full of information that becomes known and can be disseminated
when scanned into a computer. The company is also working on a de¬
vice to track children and wandering Alzheimer’s patients via satellites
and the Global Positioning System.

What if we were able to know, from something that was flagged
deep within in the genes, that a person was predisposed to serial mur¬
der? Could we track him with an implanted device currently used by
companies such as Applied Digital Solutions? Under what circum¬
stances would it be ethical to do so? Would the legal system or the
United States government ever permit even an experiment involving
such a system? It’s important to create a discussion of these questions
now because the day will come, sooner rather than later, when doctors
using DNA analysis will have the ability to reveal whether or not we
will have a serial murderer in our midst—even before the murderer is
born.

When that day comes, I’ll know my work is done.

EPILOGUE

WHERE DO WE
FROM HERE?

D own in my basement, past bicycles, hockey equipment, and
the rhythmic sounds of the furnace, there is a dog-eared card¬
board box. In it is a large plastic container. As I pull out and carefully
open it, the odor of formaldehyde hits me. What’s inside doesn’t look
like much, sliced up into segments as it was years ago, but there it is:
John Wayne Gacy’s brain. I know it sounds a little gruesome, but as
I’ve mentioned, Gacy’s family permitted me to keep it for scientific re¬
search purposes. I lift the container to eye level, and as I look at what
was once living gray matter, I wonder to myself, What will you be able
to tell me when I have the proper tools? How soon will the secrets in¬
side you be revealed? For me, it can’t be soon enough.

As I look back over the past thirty years of my career, I know I have
moved forward in beginning to understand the unusual minds of se¬
rial murderers. Still, there are many questions to be answered, and
sometimes I think there are far more questions than answers. I do feel
that in the next twenty years, staggering progress will be made,
progress that will make the genetics that helped to capture Green River
Killer Gary Ridgway appear primitive. That being said, not nearly
enough has evolved in the way psychiatrists, profilers, and law en-

264 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

forcement types approach the serial killer phenomenon. In the mid-
1970s, for instance, the FBI’s Robert Ressler is said to have coined the
term “serial killer.” Prior to this time, a series of unsolved murders with
similar facts across the cases were often called stranger murders.
Ressler, who believes that those who are cruel to animals may become
serial killers, continues to label serial murderers as monsters and
demons, which is the kind of thing that promotes fear in the general
populace, not knowledge and understanding. In his most recent book,
Ressler even cites pornography as leading to serial killing. But as I’ve
pointed out in chapter after chapter, it is not a perceived weakening in
the American moral fiber but a genetic anomaly that probably causes
serial murderers to kill.

After so many years, I almost expect the FBI’s investigators not to
understand because their ideas based in behavioral science haven’t
changed much over the last few decades. And whenever I learn of their
work, I still feel that they treat women as outsiders, just as I was when
I worked on my first case, that of Mad Biter Richard Macek. Now I’m
used to it and it bothers me much less. But in 2002, I heard of a com¬
mittee meeting held during a national conference at which a psychia¬
trist had presented what he called a startling new theory about the
development of the serial killer and why they killed. His theory of de¬
velopment of these killers was not new—I had presented the material
at the same annual conference, years earlier! Fie was trying to say the
theory was his own, when it clearly was my theory. I called the psychi¬
atrist and confronted him with this fact and said, “I presented this en¬
tire developmental theory in 1990, have been working on the theory
for many years, and here you are in 2002 representing that your the¬
ory is brand-new. Flow can you do that?” Fie stopped our conversa¬
tion, and to this day will not discuss this with me. Any conference that
promotes the free exchange of new ideas is fine by me. Flowever, it
does the psychiatric community as a whole no good when a colleague
makes another’s theory his own. It reminded me of a time when some
Flollywood producers came to me, asking to pick my brain. They had
big ideas about a show about a profiler and said that if I cooperated, I
would be, in some way, a consultant for the program. So I spoke with

Where Do We Go from Here? | 265

them for days. They left, and they did the show, but I never heard from
them again. I would almost expect that kind of spin from wheeling-
and-dealing producers, but when a fellow psychiatrist does that, it
really irks me. Even worse, what he was also trying to do was to shoe¬
horn serial murderers into current theory, which states that serial mur¬
derers are developmentally disabled and perhaps even autistic. What he
was trying to do was to find some commonality between childrens de¬
velopmental disabilities and the way a serial murderer acts, but as we’ve
seen, it’s not as easy as shoehorning one theory into another.

There are some very specious theories out there about what makes
a serial killer. Perhaps the strangest is that of psychologist Joel Norris,
who in his book Serial Killers infers that diet, malnutrition, and vita¬
min deficiencies cause a serial murderer to act. Norris suggests that
anything from lead to cobalt poisoning to consuming too much sugar
can lead to killing. I was surprised he didn’t say getting heartburn from
eating pepperoni pizza ends in serial murder. Those who espouse other
theories say that trauma, childhood abuse, and being treated badly—
everything from a hated teacher to being fired at a job—causes a serial
murderer to kill. We’ve also seen in this book that Dr. Dorothy Lewis
believes that a cyst or injuries to the brain can result in a person turn¬
ing to serial killings. But no one has been able to prove successfully
that these societal or medical injuries lead to murder. That’s why I’ve
proposed the kind of careful, serious testing of the patient outlined in
the previous chapter and presented with more detail below.

Why did Marcelo de Andrade feel the need to listen to tapes of his
crying brother? Why didn’t Englishman Fred West ever attack his wife
and partner in crime, Rose West? Why didn’t she become one of his
dismembered victims? Why did Robert Berdella cut the head off only
two of his victims and not all? Again: more questions than answers.
The fact is, these people don’t fit the profiles of the other murderers
that I know. And they don’t fit templates or equations, such as if you
have someone who chokes cats, wets his bed, and has an overbearing
mother and a violent father, you will eventually have a serial murderer.
The upshot is that I don’t yet know all the answers.

A major question that I am often asked regarding my research on

266 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

serial killers is, How do their brains work? Here too more questions
than answers have arisen, and no wonder. Today the brain is being
studied as if it were made up of individual trees, and often researchers
don’t have the foresight to see the forest, the whole. If that’s the case
with research into the brains of average people in general, we haven’t
even looked at the leaves of the trees with serial killers, and it isn’t just
the forest we haven’t understood with serial killers, it’s most of the
ecosystem.

I’ve dissected brains and the information I get when I look at those
gray pieces provides less knowledge than I had hoped to obtain.

And this process is being repeated not only by me, but also by many
others as well. So I ask questions again and again. Is the brain prewired
at birth? How do I find out what influences the developing brain, es¬
pecially in the serial murderer? Are the influences limited to environ¬
ment, genes, and culture or just to genes? Scientists estimate that there
are 300 million feet of wiring in the brain, and 10 billion cells. So dis¬
covering precisely which areas of the brain influence particular behav¬
ior or emotion is no easy task.

How are the brain regions connected so they end up specializing in
certain functions like taste, sight, smell, or in a serial killer, the act of
constant murder? Again, it’s difficult to say with precision.

Emotions are known to originate in both the body and the brain.
This recognition is the result of research in the area of the brain called
the frontal lobe. Long known as the focus of the integration of thought
and cognition, body sense, volition, and a sense of self, research into
the frontal lobe is beginning to unravel a mystery that has plagued neu¬
roscientists, ethicists, and religious scholars over time. Most of this sci¬
entific research basically points to the fact that there is truly no fine
line that differentiates brain from body, and that makes it harder to
pinpoint what makes a serial killer kill.

The aim of detailing my journey in this book was not to sit back
and spin tales about my dealings with serial killers, but rather to ex¬
plain that we are indeed slowly getting closer to answers. The electrical
system of the brain was initially studied with external tools, such as
brain-wave study. Thirty years ago, firing patterns of the brain were

Where Do We Go from Here? | 267

measured by attaching electrodes to the head, electrodes that could
measure what was happening in a single cell. Three decades later, we
have the capacity to see images of the human brain as it functions, and
we can see how it works while people do anything from making ethi¬
cal judgments to playing a hand in poker.

Where we face real difficulty is in answering how the brain is in¬
volved in the concept of free will. Some of our thoughts, behaviors,
and actions are conscious. Many more are not conscious. All of us
make decisions and choices, including the serial murderer. Are his
choices those of free will, or are they already somehow predetermined?
Neurotransmitters work with neuronal systems, and the combination
of these yields the underpinning of thought, feelings, and behavior.
Neurotransmitters and enzymes are also involved in cognition in the
prefrontal lobe areas of the brain. If there are weaknesses in the sys¬
tem, then there will be weaknesses in what the person thinks, shows,
or feels.

To understand what makes a serial murderer murder, it’s important
to know how all of us develop. Brain circuits actually begin developing
prior to birth. They continue to develop, and males do not reach their
brain maturation until their middle or late teens. Brain circuits change
and grow through a persons life as a result of the influence of cells and
genes, and of culture and environment. Anyone who has had an infant
knows that each baby is born with a temperament, be it easy or diffi¬
cult. Even though each child has the same parents, each child can be
completely different. So parents could have ten children, each with
wildly different characteristics, and none might grow up to be a serial
murderer. And even if parents have no ancestral history of violence and
most of their children have no violent streaks whatsoever, they still
might have a child that is a genetic anomaly, a serial murderer.

The Human Genome Project, begun in the 1980s and completed
in the first years of this century, explained the genetic sequences in
humans. It is hoped that being able to define and delineate the se¬
quences, especially of known disease, will assist in the management of
those illnesses. Molecular genetics will help us to identify genes that
are susceptible to causing certain diseases. Once this procedure be-

268 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

comes accurate and common, I may be able to answer with some fi¬
nality this question: is serial murdering a disease? I feel it is, but I need
to prove it.

I often wonder whether both the newest and future technology will
help me to identify the potential for criminal acts. If we do identify
that potential, what are we ethically and morally permitted to do to the
potential criminal? It’s a fact of the American justice system that Amer¬
icans do not imprison people for what they think. Would you or I feel
different about a neighbor if we knew without a doubt that our next-
door neighbor Tracy’s baby would become a serial murderer? Would we
be frightened? Would we try to jail the baby and make pariahs of the
parents?

Can we predict, with certainty, that a person will commit an act of
violence? That’s been the question posed by the courts to me and
forensic clinicians before making a decision regarding whether a per¬
son must be hospitalized against his will, whether an order of protec¬
tion must be served, or whether a serial killer should be executed
because he will kill again. It’s somewhat easier for juries to decide guilt
if someone has killed thirty-three people. But what happens if we pre¬
dict that a person is at a high risk to commit the most violent of acts,
what do we do then? Though we can’t imprison a person based on
thoughts he may have, we should have the protection of the public as
our goal.

When I wrote about John Wayne Gacy earlier in this book, one of
the defenses was that he may have had a so-called criminal gene, the
XXY chromosome of Klinefelter’s syndrome. Actually, it’s been found
that it’s not always the case that someone with this chromosome
arrangement will become violent. A promise of early identification was
followed by the recognition that the gene did not invariably produce a
person who engages in criminal behavior. On the other hand, a con¬
troversial professor from Canada believes there is no criminal gene.
Rather, he believes that a murderer might have inherited too few genes
that regulate social responsibility. This gene deprivation, he says, may
cause violence and murder.

Whatever the theories, I believe it’s just a matter of time before

Where Do We Go from Here? | 269

were able to isolate genes that contribute to major problems, like con¬
stant, murderous violence. Right now, it’s clear that genes contribute
to many domains of cognition in the brain where thinking occurs and
to some processes of thinking.

For serial murderers, my experience has shown that once they kill,
they can never be completely rehabilitated. They must be imprisoned
and they can’t be freed—again, for the protection of the public. Does
this mean that serial killers should or should not be subjected to the
death penalty? Will every doctor who participates in the death hearing
for a serial murderer be castigated by physicians’ organizations like
Physicians for Human Rights that do not believe in the death penalty?
Though they have not condemned me at this point in time, PHR may
lash out at forensic experts, similar to the way in which PETA goes
after people who wear fur coats.

PHR mightn’t like it, but I have a plan to go about testing a serial
murderer. If I use MRI, I might try to have one of them recall some¬
thing about one of their murders under focused attention. (Of course,
I would make sure the situation is far more controlled than the small
room without a guard in which we hypnotized Richard Macek long
ago.) If I’m able to trigger a feeling like rage by giving him a cue or a
task that would relate to homicide, I’d not just be searching for how he
would react outwardly. With MRI, I’d be looking to see what part of
the brain would “light up,” to see which area of the brain is most ac¬
tive during these times. Then I would relate these to encephalography,
radiography that produces X rays, results to see if there were any sim¬
ilarities between the two tests. I would hope to be able to see whether
there was an abnormality in the electrical system of the brain or neu¬
rotransmitter system of the brain.

As MRI continues to get more sophisticated, I believe I’d be able to
pinpoint something important in the brain function of a serial mur¬
derer. Then I might be able to plan an intervention on that area of the
brain. Would it be careful stereotactic destruction of that area of
the brain or the use of a proton beam to dissolve that small part of the
brain involved in serial killing? Doctors do use these technologies now
to treat brain disease, and they do work.

270 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

One of the neuropsychology tests I perform on serial murderers is
a paper and pencil test that serial murderers take, and some are like
the one I gave to John Gacy, which dealt with throwing the ball into
the woods. In the early days of neuropsychological testing of serial
murderers, the tests were so long that many were unable to finish
them; they can take up to twelve hours to complete. A serial killer just
cannot focus on a structured task for that length of time. Forget a
written test, it’s difficult for him even to talk for that long. He’ll have
many false starts and he’ll try to change the focus of the conversation
because he wants to think he’s in charge. Today, I can use a new kind
of neuropsychology test that allows for shorter assessments that are
just as accurate as the longer tests. This neurocognitive profiling helps
to clarify the subtlest deficits in functioning. In addition, the inter¬
pretation of these test scores is being updated almost constantly, so I
can compare the results with a very wide base of results from others
on a private Internet site reserved for doctors who are qualified to in¬
terpret tests.

There are more tests that I’d use when dealing with a serial mur¬
derer. There’s an IQ test, of course, which measures general intelli¬
gence. Then, there’s the q test, which measures many different ways of
thinking rather than a numerical score and tells me that there are com¬
mon differences in these abilities among people. The results of this
standardized test let me offer an educated guess about what kind of
person has the ability, say, to work in a management position. A serial
killer might function well in school and in the workplace, but with the
q test, I might find he has problems personally. Here, I can also mea¬
sure attention, the capacity for a person to receive irrelevant stimuli in
the environment around him. I also measure working memory, which
is how a person uses his short-term memory.

The brain takes one function—anything from problem solving or
motor function—in the frontal lobes and connects this with the area
that stores long-term memory, the parietal lobes, which are located
toward the back of the brain. Problem solving happens in these con¬
nections, and I would like to see what differences there may be be¬
tween a so-called normal person and a serial murderer. How distinct

Where Do We Go from Here? | 271

are the thought processes that lead up to the task and what are the
thought processes afterward?

Memory in general has two parts. There’s procedural memory, or
the ability to recall past skills that have been learned, and memory that
has the ability to remember past events. Language and reading can be
influenced by genetics, and it is usually the left side of the brain that’s
involved such tasks.

But how does a person use information once he gets it? Infor¬
mation has to be processed or passed through the cognitive system.
The brain reacts with its electrical response to stimuli, and that can
be measured by something called event-related potential, or ERP. A
doctor interprets the results of continuous electroencephalography
from the electrical patterns of all brain areas and looks at the re¬
sults, which come in graph form. What’s measured isn’t simply the
fact that some sensory stimuli are being registered, but also the
meaning of what’s being registered. What I would like to do if I was
allowed to test serial killers is to find out whether murders mean
nothing to them.

In addition, I’d like to try brain imaging and see what results those
tests bring. You can imagine how those in charge of correctional insti¬
tutions react to the suggestion that a serial murderer be moved to a
nonsecure facility for “just testing.” They just wouldn’t do it, not right
now, anyway. But I believe tests like imaging could help me to learn
much about a serial killer.

In the mid-1970s when the CAT scan was developed, this com¬
puterized axial tomography allowed doctors to see how brain structures
looked. When MRI was developed and put into use, magnetic reso¬
nance imaging took the process a step further, allowing doctors to see
the brain, not just gray matter, but white matter as well, which allows
the various gray-matter areas to communicate with one another. Now,
fMRI, or functional MRI, helps doctors understand how parts of the
brain function when a person is given a range of tasks like reading or
mathematical problem solving. It can even indicate the part of the
brain that feels rejection when one person is shut out of a game and
two others continue playing. If I tried fMRI testing with a serial mur-

272 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

derer and re-created the task of murder, I might possibly see the area
of the brain involved in killing. But if I asked Gary Ridgway about the
killing of, say, Marie Malvar, and I brought in another murder in
which he played no part, what would be the outcome? The theory
would be that he would not react to the murder he hadn’t committed,
and that he would deal with the results of the reaction to this murder
as if it were a placebo in a clinical drug test. Would the serial murderer
even be able to find enough working memory to deal with completing
the test of the murder he did do? Even if he didn’t finish the test, would
part of the brain “light up” even if he couldn’t verbalize what he’d
done? These are some of the questions that intrigue me, questions I
would love to begin to answer.

Further, I might try another imaging test, called DTI. Diffusion
tensor imaging is another magnetic resonance test that would allow me
to differentiate among white matter fiber tracts in the brain. Would
there be any abnormality in those tracts that I couldn’t see through any
other means of testing? DTI would also allow me to see in three di¬
mensions on a computer screen the microstructure of tissue. As if I
were looking through a powerful microscope, I could see aberrations I
cannot see with the usual MRI tests. Even more incredibly powerful is
the newest of the new, four-dimensional brain imaging, which pro¬
vides breathtakingly detailed and precise views of the brain. Positron-
emission tomography, or PET, measures the energy found when
radioactivity is released in brain tissue. This involves very expensive
equipment and an extensive staff but would allow me to make infer¬
ences about a serial murderer’s neural activity if the activity were dif¬
ferent from that of a normal person. Single photon emission computed
tomography (SPECT) is a bit like PET because a radioactive tracer is
taken up by the brain, tracers that can be active in as few as two or
three minutes. Here, by interpreting different superbright colors in
parts of the image, I could see what blood-flow changes to the brain
look like.

As I’ve mentioned in various parts of this book, there are at least
nine things that are common among serial killers:

Where Do We Go from Here? | 273

—They do not have motives for their murders.

—They have no personality structures and do not fit into the
usual theories of development espoused by people like Freud or
Kohut.

—They are not psychopaths because psychopaths can have the
ability to control what they do, think, and feel.

—They are not mentally retarded; most of them have an above-
average intelligence.

—They are not psychologically complete human beings, even
though they can mimic and play roles.

—They have not all been sexually abused, nor have they all been
physically abused.

—They are addicted to killing and they cannot control their
actions.

—Serial murder is not a phenomenon only of Western society. It
happens around the world.

—Serial murder is not a new phenomenon. It probably began
with the most primitive of societies thousands of years ago.

I keep these in mind wherever I happen to be when I profile serial
murderers. If you, the reader, remember some or all of these points
when watching frightening reports about the latest killer, you too will
be able to keep the strange phenomenon of serial murder in perspec¬
tive.

I place John Gacy’s brain back in the box because my kids are call¬
ing for me upstairs. As I walk up the stairs, I’m not sure that I’ll ever
show them this book, at least not until they ask and definitely not until
they are adults. It’s been difficult, but I feel I’ve done a good job in
keeping them separated from the ultraviolent world of serial killers.

It’s time to pile into the family car and go to a hockey game and,

274 | My Life Among the Serial Killers

speaking of violence, watch our son play. After all, I shouldn’t think of
serial killers all the time. My bet is that I will not hear of a new serial
murderer case today. No lawyers will call to aggravate me, and no one
will ask me to leave town to puzzle over a crime scene.

But I will leave my cell phone on . . . just in case. The cell phone
is always on.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

H ow does one acknowledge the many people who have assisted
in making the book that you hold in your hands? Always,
someone may be inadvertently left out and any lapse on my part is just
that, just a lapse. I apologize to all of you. To our agent, Chris Cal¬
houn, who always came up with answers immediately, and Diana
Thorn, his assistant, who never lost her cheerfulness. To our editor,
Mauro DiPreta, for his incisive, clear vision of what we needed to do
to refine and explain our topic; to Joelle Yudin for managing the reams
of paper and e-mails, and never losing anything, including us. To all
those on the William Morrow team who sat patiently through meet¬
ings and left their mark on those meetings with their enthusiasm and
curiosity. Especially to my cowriter, Harold Goldberg, who waded
through boxes of documents, and managed to have innumerable tele¬
phone conferences during which the book took shape and meaning.
I truly appreciate and thank you all.

I must also acknowledge those in my life who have given selflessly,
with true, honest, and ethical behavior. They understood the scope of
this and assisted me in the research I continue to conduct. To Dr.
Richard Anderson, mentor and friend; dedicated geneticists, neu¬
ropathologists, neurosurgeons, physicians, psychologists, law enforce¬
ment and correctional personnel, and lawyers who are mentioned in
the book. Some wish to remain anonymous due to the often negative
lessons they have learned from those who have tried to sensationalize
and therefore minimize their work and scientific contributions. To

276 | Acknowledgments

those peers who have been obstructionists at best, and pernicious at
worse, I also thank you. You taught me that no one can derail the pur¬
suit of true collegiality in search of scholarly knowledge.—Helen Mor¬
rison

T o Helen Morrison for being smart, strong, and brave enough to
make the leap. The genius and keen eye of Helen J.P., always
helping to weather the storm. Chris Calhoun, friend and agent, for
making it happen literally overnight. Maer Roshan for the thoughtful
tip. The hip craftsmanship of Mauro DiPreta, which put it all into per¬
spective. John Saul and Mike Sack for simply being cool. Andrew Lee,
Chris Tennant, Drew Kerr, and Steven Kent for their honest enthusi¬
asm. Joelle Yudin for being organized. In the Queen City of the Lakes,
Aunt Alexandra, Aunt Mary, Paul, John O., and Rud for being them¬
selves. Catharine and Jeffrey Soros for the witty nights on their porch
in sea-sprayed Nantucket. Diana, Tracy, and Nancy at Bar 6 for bright¬
ening this work on Wednesdays. Patrick Porter, David T. Bazelon, and
Adam Moss for knowing what writing really means. Big Indian, the
bear, the beaver, and even the mice there, for being the escape from the
darkness.—Harold Goldberg

About the Authors

Helen Morrison, M.D., is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry
and Neurology for general psychiatry as well as child and adolescent
psychiatry. She is also a certified forensic psychiatrist. She is the editor or
coauthor of four academic books, as well as the author or coauthor of
more than 125 published articles in her field. Dr. Morrison has worked
with both national and international law enforcement, and has made
presentations in more than fifteen countries. She lives in Chicago with her
husband and children.

Harold Goldberg has written for the New York Times Book Review , Vanity
Fair, and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City.

To receive notice of author events and new books by Helen Morrison and
Harold Goldberg, sign up at www.authortracker.com.

Credits

Jacket design by Tom Lau

Grateful acknowledgment is made to James lorio for permission to reprint
his poem

“Unmapped Woods,” from Silence Interrupted (Golden Quill Press, 1975).

MY LIFE AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS. Copyright © 2004 by Helen
Morrison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been
granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced,
transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in
or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any
form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of
PerfectBound™.

PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader August 2004 elSBN 0-06-078393-1
FIRST EDITION

10 987654321

erfectbound

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http ://www.perfectbound. com. au

Canada

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.perfectbound.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
PO. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.uk.perfectbound.com

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http ://www.perfectbound. com